The Mysteries of Marcie Fleach: Chapter 13-Boom Town
by Sketchpad
Summary: Both Marcie and Greenman have been making progress in their respective quests in time. Now, she and her friends may have finally tracked down the era in the past where their "Scooby Gang" had been stranded, but can they also assist a no-nonsense lawman tasked with bringing a mysterious mad bomber to justice?
1. Chapter 1

_1~_

A bright green and gold standard fluttered, softly, in the late afternoon sun, giving stark contrast to the red-stained grass and dull grey armor of the fallen on the battlefield.

A warhorse trod heavily to the edge of a ridge overlooking the field, bearing his silent, yet victorious, commander, who saw the effect of his vast, grim work on the ground below.

In the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, which seemed so distant to him, now, he was known as Everest Greenman, multi-millionaire owner of a global produce empire.

But, now, and in centuries yet written, he was the warring voice of a rising Druid nation, their ecclesiastical and ideological champion, whose name was whispered in reverence in the dark places of their woodland temples and shrines as The Undying Pagan Emperor, the ever-living defender of their ancient faith, and bringer of a new renaissance of the old ways.

He hadn't led his men to hard victory from this high place. Such an act would have shamed him. This was only a vantage point to admire his leading from the front, earlier, while he thought of his place in history, or rather the history he was rewriting with the blood of defeated opposition.

Centuries before, he had gathered mercenary dregs and led them on lightning hit-and-run raids and attacks on churches, temples, and the towns and cities that dared to harbor them. Now, he commanded a growing global network of spies, cowardly, turncoat leaders, hordes of pagan followers, and a standing army, thousands-strong and swelling with every new victory.

Having foreknowledge of the world's tumultuous history gave him a secret and powerful edge in his long crusade, and in the span of many lifetimes, he defied the religious worldview of the existence of the pagan supernatural, by defying death, itself.

In every war and skirmish, he survived battles that would have fell stronger men, giving credence to a divine protection that he, alone, could profess, and proved to every general in local militaries from Europe to the Middle East, to be a frightening, black-hearted foe.

To concerned nobility and the various clergy, he demonstrated his might via more subtle warfare, acquiring crucial influence, supporters, and wealth either through naked fear, blackmail, or the quiet of an assassin's blade.

A lower ranking officer approached him, breaking Greenman from his musings.

"Report," Greenman ordered him.

"Milord, the local prince is still trapped in his fortress," said the officer. "We intercepted a message calling for reinforcements, and the other nobles have fled. Based on the population of the town, more and more people are flocking to our banner."

"Good."

"Even some of the religious hard-liners are recanting their faith to join us. Probably just to survive, sir."

Greenman grinned, slightly. "Even better. If they don't follow us because of the righteousness of our cause, then they can do so out of fear. It doesn't matter, there will always be room for more, in the end."

"Of course, Milord. What are your orders, now?"

Greenman looked, calmly, from the ridge, out towards the known world that was yielding itself to his might, day after strategic day. "Same as always. Heal our wounded, bury our dead with honors, and treat the people well. As for the enemy, well, that's what the crows are for."

"And the churches and temples, shall we prepared to loot them?"

Greenman nodded. "And then burn them. Same as always."

The officer nodded, back, smartly. "Same as always, sir."

* * *

A night breeze swayed the boughs and added their soothing song to the quiet chorus of crickets chirping in the dark of a hilly Crystal Cove Cemetery, centuries hence.

If one were outdoors, taking in the night air, and looked up, he or she would be moved by the depth of stars that hung so effortlessly above. If they looked long enough, however, such a person would think it was trick of the eye that some of those stars...were _moving_.

High over the graveyard, small, round, silvery spheres bee-lined from the four winds to a rendezvous point, above.

On a small hillock, sat two squat stone crypts, and a moment later, the silvery swarm descended towards one of them, and passed through its roof.

"Camo's still holding, guys," Jason announced, tapping an icon on the touch screen on his side of the console.

Running from stored electricity from a previous day, in a previous time, the Mark II's solar-powered camo-stealth field hid the vessel and its passengers within a 360-degree image of the neighboring tomb, recorded and played back with its concealed holographic recorders.

Marcie moved a slim finger over a nearby touch screen. Underneath an icon of an eyeball surrounded by concentric circles were three words: Send, Return and Relay.

She tapped 'Return,' and a hatch on the hull of the Mark II slid away, silently, allowing the small, round objects to sink into the time machine, and then broadcast their collective data into the Mark II's computers for correlation and analysis.

After she tapped 'Relay,' Marcie looked up from her piloting console, through the shimmering disguise of the camouflage, and out onto the sepulchral landscape beyond. The height of the hill gave her an adequate view of the lonely, nighttime sight of acres and acres of weathered tombstones and memorials.

"I hope this doesn't mean anything," she muttered, then brightened for the sake of her friends and reported.

"Well, I can't say much for our landing spot, but, according to these readings from the probes we launched, we might actually be where we need to be."

"How do you know?" asked Daisy, giving herself a stretch.

"Everywhere we went, we always ended up in a different timeline instead of just going straight to the past of our own timeline, because the ship's Bloodhound system was programmed to look for the t-signatures of our group of people, and every double of that group existed in their own alternate timeline. The group we're looking for exists in the same timeline as those outsiders, Mystery Incorporated, just in the past, and I think we, finally, arrived."

"If that's true, then I can finally see Daphne!" Daisy grinned. "What time is it?"

Red, absently, glanced at the instruments on Marcie's console. "8:48 PM."

"I meant the year," she sighed.

"November, 1882," Marcie said. "Not bad, considering this thing once went to the Cretaceous Period. Spring must've tweaked the heck out of the Mark II to get it to go further than the 83 Millennial Range he bragged about."

Red grimaced, slightly, in his seat. Scientific talk always went over his head, and thus, irked him to no end. To change the subject, he asked, "Okay, so if this is our Crystal Cove. What do we do, now?"

"Same as always," Marcie shrugged. "We ask around, but first, we have to find some period clothing, or we'll stick out like sore thumbs."

"Okay, then. Let your fingers do the walking and find us a clothing store that's still open," Daisy suggested.

Perusing the ready-made map provided by the combined reconnaissance of the small probes, earlier that evening, Marcie soon found, among the shifting row of pictures, navigated and moved by her index finger, the windowed facade of an unassuming clothes shop.

"Well, the good news is that I found one. The bad news is that we can't go there."

"Why not?" asked Daisy.

"No money, for one."

"Don't worry about it," Daisy scoffed at the supposed problem. "I'm a Blake, remember? I'm carrying enough to cover us."

"No doubt, but that's not the problem," said Marcie. "Our money wasn't printed in this century. If you use any of it, we might get arrested for counterfeiting, if not _bad_ counterfeiting."

"No problemo," Red said. "We'll just use the ol' five-finger discount on this one."

"Discount?" Jason asked, slightly confused. "I thought we couldn't use Daisy's money."

"I mean that we're going to have to _steal_ the clothes, Jellyfish," Red translated for him. He regarded Marcie, saying, "And, if that's the game plan, then we better get a move on, while it's dark."

Marcie nodded. "Agreed."

The group, quietly, disembarked and walked out of the faux crypt, their bodies distorting the surface of the illusion, as they marched down the side of the hill, and into the night..

"Remember we parked, everybody," Daisy quipped. Although she wasn't known for being a clotheshorse, like her baby sister, she was eager to enjoy a familiar pastime of the Blake women, spending wads of money. "It's time to go shopping!"

* * *

Gas lit street lights were a luxury, even in towns that could afford such technology, kept only to the most critical of quarters, and set up in the wealthiest of places in a given geography. As a result, the street on which Penway's Clothiers was located was quiet, and just as importantly, dark.

No one was present to see four dark forms move quickly through the neighborhood, navigating solely by recorded landmarks, and reach the front French door of the establishment.

A practiced application of acid along the periphery of a thin pane of glass over the lock, allowed Marcie to pop the little window into the store, then, carefully reach in, and unlock the door.

The four moved in, guided by her penlight, to the racks of finery in the center of the room, but since it was their only source of light, they had to play quick, fierce rounds of 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' to win chances at its use.

It wasn't long before clothes were selected by criteria of sheer taste and comfort (Daisy and Red), rarity of fit (Jason), and simple, casual style (Marcie), and were folded into neat piles by the front door.

On the counter by the front window, a necklace on a stand, slightly, swayed.

"Hey, do you feel something?" Red whispered.

A continuous, gradually building pulsation, translated from the soles of his feet upwards, as though he were standing on a living thing. "Crystal Cove doesn't have a subway line, does it?"

"It never did," Marcie said, suspiciously. "What's that vibration?"

The answer came in the form of dust clouds falling from the damaging plaster ceiling, clothes dummies and Cheval mirrors tipping over, clothing racks shifting around, ill-gotten clothes-piles spilt to the floor, and the four thieves being rocked to their knees, all to an undulating, geological backbeat, as a tremor danced through the streets of the neighborhood, and indeed, the whole of Crystal Cove.

Daring not to stand, for fear that they might fall over and get hurt, the teens steadied themselves as best they could on all fours, hoping that the mini-earthquake would died down.

After a few more spasms from the floor, the tremors, finally, began to subside, prompting Daisy to comment, "You'd think, with us living in California, we'd be used to this, now."

"Let's get our clothes and get out of here before something else happens," Red suggested, before the unyielding hardness of a shotgun barrel was shoved into his back by the incensed proprietor of the store. "Rats."

The rest looked behind the man to see where he came from, spying an open door that led to a storage room in the back, flanked by two smaller rooms.

"Just our luck," Marcie sighed to herself. "We _would_ hit the one store in town with an armed insomniac for a owner."

* * *

The iron bars of the holding cell in the Sheriff's Office might as well have been made of wet bread compared to the sheer hardness of the grim, lined face of the sheriff who peered at Marcie and her friends from where he stood, after hanging up his rumpled and weathered hat and duster.

Sheriff William 'Iron Will' Williamson, studied them with undisguised disdain and disgust, while he listened to Mr. Penway squawk about the criminals.

"So far, so good, Sheriff," the proprietor sighed in relief. "Those hooligans didn't get a chance to run off with any of my merchandise. Good thing I was in the back counting my inventory before the quake hit. I wanted to see if my store was all right, and then I see these... _people_ attempting to steal from me. It's bad enough I get accosted by that no-account Rocky Rattler, at times, but now, I get robbed at night, too?"

"All right, Penway. You brought them over here. Good job," Will praised. "I'll take care of it, now. You better get your store in order for tomorrow."

Reminded of his business after fearing that he would lose it, Penway took a breath to calm himself. "Yes...Yes, you're right, of course. My mind's in a tizzy, what with all of these tremors and such, going on. Thank you, Sheriff, and good night."

"'Night," the sheriff muttered, as Penway left the office and the sheriff to his investigation.

Will strolled back to the cell, staring holes into the surface of the teens' chrononaut uniforms. Jason, not wearing such a garment, felt relieved that he wasn't look at, like a specimen.

"Why are you dressed like that?" the lawman asked, gruffly. "You from the circus, or something?"

"No. We're, uh, just, uh..." Marcie sputtered, feeling a need to explain themselves and garner some brownie points.

Daisy attempted to pick up the ball after Marcie's fumble. "Visitors...from, uh..."

"New York?" added Jason.

"Humph," Will rolled his squinty eyes and growled. "Figures. All right, which one of you is Nitro?"

"Nitro?" Daisy asked. "Who's he?"

Will walked over to his desk and leaned against the front of it, keeping his hard stare on the teens.

"It's obvious that _'he's'_ one of you. C'mon, now, Nitro, fess up!" he barked. "Every time there's been one of them quakes, you've been robbing and wrecking places owned by the Darrows. Don't know why you'd waste your time hitting a clothes store. They don't even own one. But, that's where you slipped up, and now I've got you _and_ your bunch."

"That's nice and all, Ricochet," Red said, flippantly. "But, we just got into town, and we don't know anything about robbing and wrecking. You reckon?"

"Keep it up," Will warned. "If you _are_ Nitro, don't think a judge'll go easy on you just because you and your partners are young. A noose ain't no respecter of age, boy."

The front door squeaked open before the sheriff could continue his speech on juvenile sentencing and capital punishment, allowing a well-dressed man in a bowler to step, stiffly, into the office's shabby interior, feeling as though he had walked into an abattoir.

A feeling that the sheriff was all-too able to recognize in the visitor, as he casually stood up to face the man.

"I didn't know they let butlers out this late," Will quipped.

"I am a representative of The Darrow Family, as you well know, Sheriff!" the man said, haughtily. "And I have been sent to relay their feelings on your performance of late. That Nitro criminal just attacked another Darrow place of business! The sixth since those blasted quakes! Stupid California!"

"You can always move, y'know?" offered Will.

"Move?" the man asked, almost giggling from the sheer folly of the sheriff's statement. "The Darrows have been a part of this town for years. They made their fortune, here, and built half of this town. As a result, all of Crystal Cove has prospered under their extreme generosity."

"Yeah, yeah, Fancy-pants," Will drawled in exasperation. "I've heard the history lesson before."

"Have you, now? Well, allow me to bring a new addendum to light. If you continue to displease the Darrows, and by extension, the mayor, with this slipshod work of yours, you'll may find His Honor making a request to the governor to have you replaced with someone _competent_! Good night!"

With that, the Darrow man turned, sharply, on his heel and marched out, relieved to not have to stay in the office another second.

"Go sit on a cactus," Will muttered. Then, a question was issued from the holding cell.

"Pardon me, sir, but we couldn't help but overhear," Marcie said, diplomatically. "Where did that attack take place?"

"Huh? Uh, that big school of theirs," he answered, absently. "Halfway across town."

"Darrow University?" Marcie reasoned. "Then, I put it to you that we couldn't be working for this Nitro, since the clothes store we were caught in was closer to your office, than the university."

Returning to his spot on the desk, Will, thoughtfully, had to agree with the logic of that. "Well, I guess I have to give your reasoning some consideration, in light of being given a dressing down by Fancy-pants, just now. Falsely arresting all of you for a crime you didn't commit wouldn't look good on my record in this town."

"I'm glad that you understand, Sheriff," Marcie grinned, pleased to know that she wouldn't have to leave the holding cells of a future Crystal Cove sheriff, just to languish in the cells of an erstwhile one. "So, would you be kind enough to let us out?"

"Oh, and could you recommend a good place to eat?" Jason added.

"The best place I can think of is an inn in town that's owned by some Frenchman, but that's neither here or there. See, even though I can't fault you for the Darrows' woes, you're still in trouble for breaking into Penway's store, so you stay put."

"Well, we really wouldn't have done that, sir," Daisy pressed with a charm offensive, trying to exorcise depressing thoughts of her wasting away in prison. "But, we really needed better clothes."

The sheriff gave another critical gaze at their form-fitting attire, then nodded, empathically. "I can understand, walking around in that get-up, but the law's the law. No excuses. And don't be trying to negotiate with me, either. The law _can't_ be negotiated."

"It can, if you're a lawyer," Jason muttered.

A dour, fearful silence fell over the cell, as Marcie scowled in thought. She didn't need this to slow her down on the mission. Then, after giving it another thought, an idea flashed in her mind, and she offered, "How about we pay for our crime, then, sir?"

Will had to chuckle at the girl's tenacity. "I think you _are_ , from where I'm sitting, little lady."

Marcie looked past his scoffing and latched onto the fact that he was still talking to her. A good sign in any negotiation. "No, no! I mean let us help you solve this crime. In exchange for a place to stay, at least, for a little while."

Will shrugged. "No, thanks, besides I already solved the problem of where you'll be staying, anyhow."

"But, we can't stay here, forever!" Jason wailed. "My mom's waiting for me!"

"You won't. It's just for a few days."

"Please, Sheriff, be reasonable!" Marcie pressed. "We don't have any money, or a place to stay, but we're really good at solving mysteries!"

Her negotiations came to a abrupt halt when Will raised his hand to stop her talking. "Little lady, this is the Sheriff's Office, not a hotel!"

With a breakdown in the negotiations, Marcie backed down, bowed by the possibility that she wouldn't be getting anywhere with the sheriff.

"Why are Crystal Cove sheriffs the most pig-headed bunch of people ever to walk the Earth?" she muttered to herself.

"Still," Will grumbled to himself. "The mayor's has been on me to solve this case, right pronto, since he and the Darrows are pretty tight."

An opening in the talks still existed. "Yeah! Yeah!" Red interjected. "And, uh, we can help you get on their good side!"

"I don't care about being on anybody's good side, boy. All I care about is serving the law. As long as I'm alive, I'm the justice in this here town," Sheriff Williamson growled, proudly.

Then, with more humility, he told them, as he walked over to the cell's door. "Still, I'm man enough to admit when a case might be too big for me to handle. You say that you got no place to go. If you New Yorkers _can_ help me with this case, then I'll use my power of authority to deputize you for the duration. But, no weapons. Sound fair?"

With a cacophony of hasty agreements and relieved cheers, the door was unlocked, the teens happily left the cell behind, and then they entered the wild and wooly world of Nineteenth-Century law enforcement.

* * *

"I wonder how this Nitro even knew when the earthquakes were going to come," Daisy pondered aloud while she polished the benches in one of the holding cells with a stained cloth, the next morning.

"I don't know, exactly, but it's obvious that he's using the earthquakes to cover his crimes," Marcie said, polishing the bars from her cell. "He could have some seismological equipment with him to predict when a quake would occur. The science was still being utilized even then, uh, I mean, now."

From his desk, Will was sorting through some paperwork and reports while he listened to the conference around him. He glanced up at the workers.

"Do a good job in there, girls," he told them. "I want those bars shinning like the doorknob of a cathouse when your done."

"I didn't know you can keep cats in houses, like with dogs," Jason mused, while he folded the blankets they used last night. "I wonder why we don't do it, anymore?"

Marcie glanced at him. "That's not what-"

"Marcie," Daisy interjected, sagaciously. "Let him find out on his own."

"You boys about through over there?" the sheriff asked.

"Finishing up, here," Red said, sweeping the last of the tracked-in dirt from the floor out the door.

"Yes, sir," said Jason, then added. "But, what I don't understand, Mr. Williamson, is why he's only targeting places that the Darrows own? Why is he so mad at them?"

Will gave a thoughtful look, then related. "Y'know, I asked them that once, and they told me that Nitro could have been sent by a business rival to put a hurting on their finances and public image. Whoever Nitro is, he's sure doing that, and them some."

He, then regarded the teenagers. "Okay, kids. I've got some good news and some bad news."

"What's the good news?" Marcie asked.

"Well, do all of you swear to do all you can to uphold and enforce the letter of the law?"

"Yes," they said in unison, wondering why he would need to ask such a thing.

"Then, the good news is that you're all sworn deputies of the town of Crystal Cove, California," he grunted, as he stood up.

"And what's the bad news?" asked Red.

"I only had the two deputy badges on hand," Will explained. "I took them to the blacksmith to get them cut in half, so you all will be wearing half-badges for the duration. But, half a badge or none, your all deputies, now, and I expect you to go pick up your stars, well...half of them, after you get some decent clothes from Penway's, first. Tell him to put it on my tab. He knows I'm good for it."

"But, Sheriff," Red joked. "Isn't comfort and freedom of movement important to a man?"

"Quit your jawing and get." the sheriff scolded. "No deputy of mine is going to embarrass the office by riding in a posse with them blue pajamas."

With the girls leaving the immaculate cells, they followed the boys out the door of the sheriff's office, and into the rest of the day.

In the light of late morning, the gang saw that Old Crystal Cove wasn't the typical town that one would see in Westerns. They were, more often than not, located in somewhat habitable stretches of desert land, poor, ramshackled affairs with citizens eking out a living from what scarce resources the desert could provide. Not so, here.

Crystal Cove was a coastal, Californian town, green with pine, wide of paved boulevards, and strong of infrastructure, blessed by its full bounty of timber, local mining, transoceanic and neighboring trade with Gatorsburg, a cool, temperate climate with a hint of sea breeze, and a contented and prosperous citizenry.

Put back in order from the previous night's action, the interior of Penway's Clothiers looked serene and quiet.

The French door, now with a patch of wood where the one glass pane was breached, opened, admitting four pensive teenagers and the raucous laughter of the citizenry howling in their wake. They were relieved to duck into any building that would shield them from the jeers of the linen, leather and gingham crowd.

"I can't believe how many people were laughing when they saw us. I felt like I walked into a cosplay gone horribly wrong," Jason groaned.

Red leaned against the store counter near the entrance and agreed with his friend, dejectedly. "No kidding. It's hard to be cool when they're laughing at you, this hard."

Marcie headed for the women's section with Daisy. "Big whoop. Every painted lady coming out of that saloon wanted know if Daisy and I wanted jobs in the Red Light District. I didn't even know Crystal Cove had one."

Only Daisy took the various taunts in stride, and shrugged it off, good-naturedly. "Just tell everybody that they're the latest fashion in France. I hear that they eat that stuff up."

Red looked around the store when he didn't see anyone minding the counter. "Where's the owner?"

"I don't know," said Jason, listening through the stillness of the establishment. Then, he heard something. "Wait! What's that noise...in the back?"

From the rear of the store, in the back room where Mr. Penway had the drop on them last night, sounds of a conversation could be heard, but they were too faint to be discerned, clearly.

"Hello, we just wanted to say that we're sorry for trying to rob you, last night," Marcie called out. "We'd like to buy some clothes from you, and smooth things out, if we could."

"Psst!" Daisy whispered the others. She pointed over to the counter, and to the cash register that was both open and cleared of money.

The back room door opened slowly, and a heavy-set, vested man with a salmon bandanna concealing half his face, backed out, one hand holding a large bag of money, and the other, holding a gun pointed at the room's dim interior to cover his escape.

He craned his neck to search behind him for the source of the voice who spoke just then, but saw no one.

However, so focused was he on looking for phantom speakers and closing the distance to the front door, that he didn't notice the slick patch of ice that was spread wide across the wooden floor, until his boots slipped out from under him, and he crashed against the deck hard enough to loose his gun from his hand.

Momentarily dazed, and still on his back, he turned his head to look for the weapon, but then, locked his sight on the large, yelling red-head that barreled out of nowhere, jumped into a high arc with a thick arm folded and pointed downwards, and rammed the breath from his body with a well-placed elbow drop to the man's ample gut.

As the man doubled over in breathless agony, Daisy and Jason rushed him with stylish, leather belts and helped Red swiftly hog-tie the criminal, while Marcie watched the proceedings and covered them with a readied Discourager capsule.

A man's voice called out from inside the room. "What's all that commotion?

The man stepped out, gingerly, in case the robber was still in the store and hadn't finished his predations. When he saw the thief suitably restrained, with the youths from earlier, standing over him, and Jason sitting on him, for good measure, Penway almost laughed at his turn of fortune.

"Well, I'll be bankrupt!" he swore. "It's you strangers from last night. You trussed him up neater that a Christmas goose! What brings you back here, anyway?"

"We came to apologize for trying to rip you off, and to buy some clothes from you," Daisy told him.

The proprietor cast a baleful glance down at the figure on the floor. "Well, this skunk, Rocky Rattler, been robbing my store more than a few times, and never gave me so much as a hello, let alone an apology for it. If one of you could fetch Iron Will-"

"Who?" the teens asked in unison.

"Iron Will. The sheriff," Penway amended.

"Oh, well, it's funny that you should mention him," Red said, cockily. "We're his deputies."

"Or we _will_ be, once we get new clothes," said Jason, standing up from a gasping, winded Rocky. "After that, we promise, as long as we're deputies, no one will ever rob your shop, again."

Plucking the money bag from the floor, Penway walked over to the cash register to deposit the contents. "Well, then, youngsters, let me help you make that official. For saving my shop's earnings, I'll see to it that you're all given some clothes to call your own, free of charge."

"Well, the sheriff did say that you could put it on his tab," Jason replied, before he departed from the store.

"That works, too," Penway said, quicker than he might have wanted. "I'll have to ring it up, since my cashier's out on an errand. Dressing rooms are in the back."

Marcie, now clad in a tan and tangerine-colored bustle dress, with a draped, cranberry shawl, and her chrononaut utility belt, sauntered down the street, past its light, horse-drawn traffic towards the local smithy. Daisy flowed confidently in a prairie dancer dress and her neck scarf, while Red styled a look that was the closest to what he would have worn back home, a striped, homespun shirt, his leather vest, jeans and a pair of boots.

Besides their new looks, they were all cloaked in the mantle of assurance that came from, finally, not having an All-points Bulletin put out on them by the fashion police.

"Y'know, Marcie, you'd probably look better with some contact lenses," Daisy offered.

"Nah," Marcie shook her head. "I like what I'm wearing. Besides, it's not like you ever needed to wear glasses."

Daisy leaned close to Marcie and whispered, conspiratorially, "Don't spread it around, but I actually used to wear specs bigger than your head, a white turtleneck shirt, pink pants, and purple shoes. I was into the whole Geek Chic thing, back then. But, after a while, I outgrew it. Though, honestly, I don't know how you can still pull it off."

"Well, y'know," Marcie said, self-consciously. "It just comes naturally to some people, I guess."

The slow, almost rhythmic sound of struck metal rang through the neighborhood of stables, and tacking and feed stores, coming from the wide, barn-like structure and the open double doors of Hardy Clinker's smithy.

Stepping through the threshold, and greeted by a wall of heat generated by a glowing forge at the far end of the tool-decorated work area, the teens walked past two parked coaches awaiting repairs, and spotted a pair of figures working near the heat source, their broad, leather smock-covered backs turned to them.

The first was a smallish, muscular hill of a man, holding a crude horseshoe with a pair of iron tongs. The other was clearly a taller specimen, musically beating shape into the product with mighty blows of a sledgehammer against a well-worn anvil.

"Excuse me," said Daisy, as they approached, trying to compete with the din of ringing metal, and the constant, low roar of a bellow-fed furnace. The smiths didn't regard her, or turn from their noisy work.

"Excuse me," she said, again, only this time louder. Still, the workers didn't react.

" _Excuse me!_ "she screamed, just as the smaller smith dunked the horseshoe into the waters of a nearby slack tub to cool. Both turned with a start to see her, sheepishly, continue. "Sorry, but we're here to pick up our badges."

When she saw who the taller worker was, her eyes goggled in her head.

Standing at his full height, awash with sweat that poured from his blonde hair and into his beard stubble, Fred Chiles regarded Daisy and the others, the sledgehammer gripped in his raw, rough fist.

It took him a moment or two to get his mental bearings after wiping his eyes clean from the stinging perspiration, but upon seeing her, his eyes, too, began to widen in unexpected recognition.

"Freddy?" gasped Daisy.

"Wha...Daisy?" whispered a stunned Chiles.

"Yes!" she answered, before Freddy laughed and rushed forward, giving her a bear hug that would have deformed a steel bar.

"I can't believe it!" he yelled in voice to rival the moaning forge. "What are you doing, here?"

"We came to find you guys and bring you back home!" she gasped, again. "Who else with you?"

"They are. Just coming back from André's!" he said, looking past her and the other teenagers to the wide, front entrance. "Hey, gang, come here! You'll never guess who I ran into!"

"Who is it? I only brought enough lunch for us," came a voice from outside.

The teens turned back to the doorway to see a gangly male sporting a Van Dyke-style beard and dressed in the livery of an inn's kitchen staff, and a teenaged girl in a light violet homestead dress step through with a full picnic basket.

When the teens saw who she was, Daisy's jaw lost its strength and dropped open. It was Daphne, her baby sister, still alive and whole.

It became an immediate toss-up to see who's eyes grew the widest, as Daphne took a look the girls and asked, as if it were the most important question in the world, "Daisy? Marcie? Is that...you?"

A pair of grateful smiles and nods from both of them, gave Daphne leave to release a pent-up squeal of emotion that she had been holding within her since her arrival.

The Blake Sisters rushed into a collision of animated hugs and happy tears.

"Daisy! I missed you so much!" the youngest sister, sobbed.

"Not as much as I did, baby sister!" Daisy whispered.

"I-I thought I'd never see any of you again! Are Mom, Dad, and the other sisters all right? How are they doing?"

"They're all doing fine, Daphne, and they're going to go over the moon when they see you, again."

In the midst of this joyous, long-overdue reunion, Marcie heard the sound of a whirlwind of paws coming up from behind her. She turned in response to it, and managed to see a large, brown blur overtake and playfully knock her down to the floor. Then, she felt a tongue, almost as wide as a human hand, slap, wetly, against her face.

"Rarcie!" the Great Dane and Annunaki descendant, Scooby-Doo, happily howled upon seeing her, his great weight bearing down upon her lean torso, while his tail whipped back and forth.

"Good to-Good to see you, too, Scooby-Doo," Marcie managed to say, in greeting, under the barrage of licks. "Now, get up off me, you big bear!"

"Rou should get rour glasses cleaned, Rarcie," Scooby advised, amiably. "Ri'm a dog!"

"Not from where _I'm_ sitting," she groaned. "Now, let me up."

The dog relented and Marcie regained her stance, brushing the dust from her newly acquired attire.

"Ugh! I just got this dress," she groused. She saw Scooby trot over to sit at Shaggy's side, and waved to him. "Hey, Shaggy. What's up?"

"Hey, Hot Dog-"

Marcie held up a warning finger before he could finish the lamentable epithet. "Unless you want to get buried on Boot Hill, stop calling me that."

"Oh, uh, sorry about that, Marcie," he giggled a nervous apology, while the two sisters continued to catch up.

"What have you been doing in all of this time?" Daphne asked.

"Working as a cashier over at Penway's clothing shop," her sister answered, then gave Daisy's dress a quick look. "As a matter of fact, those clothes look a lot like what he had in stock."

"Yeah, we just came from there after we foiled a dastardly crime. We stopped some bad guy from robbing the place."

"Rocky Rattler?"

"The same," Daisy said, proudly. "We're all deputies, now! On a case, and everything! That's why we're here, to pick up our badges."

Hardy Clinker, the plug-shaped blacksmith, coming back from a dusty table in the back, handed Marcie and the others, each, a bisected half of badge.

"I don't know why the sheriff wanted me to cut 'em in half, but here ya go. Wear 'em in, heh, good health," he grumbled with gallows humor.

He, then turned to Freddy, saying, "Watch the place 'til I get back. I'm goin' over to the saloon to wet my whistle."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Clinker. I'll get to work on the coaches until you get back," said Freddy, as his employer left the smithy.

"You work for him, Freddy?" asked Marcie.

"Yep. I'm his striker," he said. "That's a fancy, technical term for his assistant. Been working here ever since we came from present day Crystal Cove, I mean, the _future_ Crystal Cove, eight months ago. I think."

"We all are working, now," Shaggy continued. "Scooby and I are a cook and busboy at André's Eatery and Inn. Room and board, and all the leftovers we can eat."

"It's a rin-rin!" Scooby added, smacking his lips.

"Speaking of win-win," Freddy said, walking over to Daphne and holding her beside him with pride. "Would you like to tell them, dear?"

A blush darkened Daphne's smiling face, as she held up a hand, bearing a tarnished, unadorned gold ring.

"We got married!" she squealed to her sister.

For Daisy, calling this a day of incoming emotional shocks to rival a blitzkrieg, would have been a gross understatement. "Married? To Freddy? When?"

"A few months ago," Daphne explained. "We didn't know if we'd ever get home, so we decided to start our new lives together by getting hitched." She heard herself and gave a self-conscious chuckle. "Hitched. I think I'm going native with all of this Western talk."

Daisy couldn't help but grin at the happy news and the mature sense of that their family was transforming into a possibly bigger one. "I'm so happy for you, sis, but you know that Mom and Dad are going to flip when you come back and tell them. You know what _they_ would have done."

Daphne rolled her eyes in pleasant nostalgia. "I know. They would've wanted me to get married in the present. I mean, not _this_ present, I mean, the future. _Ugh!_ You know what I mean. They would've given every caterer in town a raise, hiring them for my wedding."

She glanced up at her husband and mused, "Jeepers, I've never been married to you twice, before. Sounds like fun!"

"Well, you know what they say," Freddy said, flirtatiously. "You can never get enough Fred."

"Oh, Freddy!" she cooed, then noticed that their guests still watching their love play, and said, "You know, when you're done for the day, come by our apartment. We can catch up some more, Daisy, and I can show you the wedding photos!"

"Sounds righteous," her older sister said to her, then said, as an afterthought, "Oh, man! Where are my manners? Marcie, you know, but this is our good friend, Red Herring. We have another friend, Jason Wyatt, but he ran to get the sheriff."

Red nodded, respectfully, to Daphne. "How are you doing, Mrs., uh, what's your husband's name?"

"Chiles," Freddy said. "Pleased to meet you."

"But, ugh, _please_ don't call me 'Mrs. Chiles.'" Daphne groaned. "I'll sound like Mom, or one of my teachers, back home. Just plane old Daphne will do."

Red nodded. "Okay. Mine's Red, but you know that, already."

"Sorry to interrupt, Daphne. Congratulations, by the way," Marcie said, eagerly. "But do you know where Velma is? Is she at work?"

There, then came an uncomfortable silence from Freddy, Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby that made Marcie's feet begin to freeze.

"What's wrong?" she asked. "Where's Velma?"

"She's...gone, Marcie," Shaggy confessed, sadly, not wanting to look directly into her eyes. "She, like, left us."

There was a distant buzzing in Marcie's ears, she grew queasy, and she felt as if another tremor was ripping through the town, threatening to tip her over at any second, to shatter, like bone china. Cold and hollow from within, she debated with herself if staying home, in ignorance of her true Velma's fate, was preferable to this.

For reasons, both emotional and intellectual, she knew that it wasn't. But, as her worried friends watched her stare off into space, she found that she couldn't recall any of them.


	2. 2

_2~_

Marcie choked back her question. "She's...dead?"

"She might as well be, Marcie," Daphne reasoned, although it hurt her deeply just to say that.

"What are you talking about?"

"Velma had been working as an assistant to one of the town's school teachers, until the teacher became too sick to teach, in which case, Velma became the new schoolmarm," explained Daphne. "She lived in the same apartment as Freddy and I, so when she didn't come home one evening, we knew something was up."

"What happened?"

"We don't know," Freddy answered, grimly. "She just never came back."

"Well, why didn't you do something?" Marcie yelled, not noticing her voice beginning to crack.

"Re _did_ , re swear!" Scooby wailed.

"We went straight to the sheriff," Shaggy added, shaking his head. "But, after weeks of looking, he told us that there wasn't enough leads to go on. Like, you'd think just because the past didn't have high-tech ways to kill, it was better, or safer, somehow, y'know? But, it's just as dangerous."

"She could have run into anything, out there, the local wildlife, a disease, one of these outlaws," Daphne, sadly, continued.

Marcie closed her eyes, sick with worry and soaring grief, but to Daphne, it might as well have been because she didn't want to hear what she thought were useless excuses.

"I'm so sorry, Marcie. Velma told me how close you two were, but we didn't know what to do. We're not detectives, like the sheriff."

The thought of her jumping into the Mark II, racing further back in time, and stopping this tragedy before it even happened, screamed in Marcie's mind, but the scientist in her held her by the gut and warned her to belay such a risky notion.

Traveling through time proved to be like walking on eggshells, no matter where one went, for whatever reason, there was bound to be disrupted history left in his or her wake. New history, near-infinite timelines were being born with every action or inaction, and just the rescuers' arrival in the past had already changed future history in some way.

The only way to resolve any of this and maintain some semblance of historical integrity was to deal with the problem in the here-and-now.

"No, you're _not_ detectives. But, I am," Marcie said with steel in her voice. "I know I told the sheriff that I would help him solve this earthquake case, but I have to find Velma, too. I don't care where it leads me...or how it ends."

As if her pained words concerning the sheriff, somehow, summoned him, Will entered the smithy, followed by a winded Jason in a red Wyoming bib shirt and a pink bandanna.

He approached the teens and inspected their attire with the half-badges catching the eye with their nickel-plated glint. It didn't look like it, through that granite face of his, but the sheriff was pleased with the new look.

"Rattler's locked up tight," he told them. "Not bad for your first apprehension, tinhorns. Now, follow me back to the office, we have to start our investigation into Nitro."

As the others, soberly, began to trail Will out the door, Marcie stayed where she was and spoke up. "Sheriff, I know that I said that we'd help you solve the case that you're working on, but I just found out that a friend of mine is missing and I want to look for her."

"Who's your friend?"

"Velma Dinkley, sir."

One of Will's eyebrow lifted. "That missing person case from a couple months ago? I tried to get to the bottom of that, but I couldn't find enough clues to find a cause for the disappearance."

"I already told her that, Sheriff," Daphne, sadly, told him.

"I don't care!" Marcie snapped at her, then caught up to her emotions. "I'm-I'm sorry, Daphne."

Then, she turned to Will. "Sheriff, I can do both. Just give me whatever information you collected on that case, while I work on this one."

Will's hard face softened just enough to show some concern. "I don't know if you can handle all of that. Maybe you ought to just stick with my case, first, and then, I'll give you all I know about the other."

Marcie's jaw clenched at the denial. Precious time was being wasted. She wanted to fight him on this, scream until her voice was raw over the sexist injustice of the decision, and tear Crystal Cove _apart_ until she had her answers, but the looks of her friends, silently, warning her not to let her rashness threaten their freedom and friendship, applied an emotionally painful choke-chain to her passions.

She nodded, curtly, and said, through her teeth, "Yes, sir."

She, then followed the rest out of the smithy, leaving sad, old acquaintances behind her, and understanding, bitterly, that the life of a deputy sheriff wasn't all it was cracking up to be.

* * *

Marcie marveled at the look of stately Darrow University, as it was almost two centuries ago. Like its modern form, it still had students, driven and otherwise, and faculty milling about and passing through its wide campuses, however, since life was slower, then, the setting looked more sedate than it would have been in modern days, later.

As the latest Darrow-owned place to fall under Nitro's attack, the sheriff split his forces to other earlier attack sites to question the managers, employees, or representatives, there. When the school was on the list, Marcie volunteered to question the dean and Will, readily, agreed, admitting that he was barely school-taught, and thus, felt uncomfortable hanging around places of higher learning.

While the clock in the bell tower rang noon, Marcie walked through the marbled halls of the facility, which was established and opened a mere twelve years prior, and asked a nearby instructor where both the Dean's Office and the chemistry labs were located. When told, she filed the information away under 'work' and 'play', respectively.

Arriving at the Dean's Office, she gave a knock and was told to enter.

"Dean Gardener?" Marcie said, announcing her presence.

The dean, a thin, hawk-nosed man in a dark blue suit, sat by his desk, listening to the hubbub of the student body outside his large, office window behind him.

He looked up from his paperwork, adjusted his spectacles, and peered at the girl standing in his doorway.

"That's _Gardner_ ," he corrected her, stiffly. "And I'm sorry, miss. I don't have time for you, right this moment. I have to go over these budget reports for the semester. I'll have to see you after your class."

"Oh, I'm not a student here, sir," she said, walking further in. "Although, I _am_ thinking of attending when this is all over."

"Then, who are you?"

"Deputy Marcie Fleach. I've been sent by Sheriff Williamson to ask you a few questions concerning last night's attack on the university during the tremors."

The dean peered at her, again, suspiciously, and Marcie knew that he was probably having trouble taking her seriously, either because of her age, or her gender, so she pointed to the badge pinned on her bodice.

"Hmm, if you are who you say you are," the dean challenged. "Then, why are you carrying only _half_ a badge, young lady?"

Not wanting to waste time explaining why the sheriff needed to have them cut in two, Marcie simply quipped, saying to him, "Government cutbacks?"

The dean, not knowing what she meant, sighed in annoyance and tried to return to his work. "You came here to ask questions? Please, do so, so that I may get on with my work."

"Was anything stolen last night?"

"I called a meeting of the staff and faculty members last night, after the attack, and they assure me that nothing was taken. Unfortunately, two classrooms and a laboratory were heavily demolished."

"Which ones?" she asked.

"An economics class room, a geology class room, and a geology laboratory. Thousands of dollars worth of sensitive equipment were ruined in a single night by that diabolical vandal!"

Marcie took a moment from the interrogation to ponder. "Hmm. Why would Nitro go through all of the trouble to destroy those specific rooms?"

The door opened, suddenly, as a professor marched into the office, and up to the dean's desk, as Gardner aimed his face back into his papers.

"Dean Gardner," said the man. "My instruments picked up another pattern last night, just as the tremors came. I think there is an intelligence behind these quakes that bears looking into, sir."

"Babcock, what have I told you about these theories of yours?" the dean asked without bothering to look up to see him. "You have no way of proving them out, and you use your machines to focus on the wrong thing. They should be sniffing out whatever rock that criminal crawled under, so the law can properly deal with him. Otherwise, you're just wasting my time, and wasting my time is wasting the _university's_ time."

"Yes, sir," the professor sighed, turning to leave. "Sorry to disturb you."

As he heard the door close, Gardner raised his head to shoo Marcie away. "Now, as for you, young-"

But, she was gone from the office, as well.

* * *

Professor Babcock fumed silently, as he headed back towards his laboratory, not knowing that Marcie had been following him the whole way, until she tapped on his shoulder outside the lab.

With a start, he spun, and didn't recognize this girl. "I'm sorry. Do you need help with anything? I start class in a few minutes."

"I'm not a student, Mr. Babcock, my name is Marcie Fleach, and I'm here to investigate the attacks on the university. You said that you picked up a pattern last night during the earthquake? Could you tell me more about it?"

"Why should I tell you anything," Babcock said, quietly. "I'm just wasting my time, apparently."

"Because, obviously, the dean wasn't a professor who appreciated the wonders of the scientific unknown. Otherwise, he would have given your theories far more consideration."

"He was a professor of economics," he told her.

"That figures," Marcie said. "An enemy of science. The bean-counter."

Babcock said nothing, but, considered her words. She might very well had been a girlish-looking reporter, he couldn't be sure, but he wanted to explain his findings, and he would have told it to a horse, if he thought the animal would listen. He made up his mind.

"I don't know you from Adam's housecat, young lady, but, for a few minutes, you have my attention. Come inside," Babcock said, stepping into the laboratory/class room.

Marcie followed him to his desk, glancing over at various geological terms and their definitions written on the chalkboard, studying the hung, cross-sectional posters of volcanoes, continental fault lines, and the Earth, shelves of geological samples and examination tools, and a primitive seismograph that sat on a table next to his desk, festooning both with a long ribbon of scrawled graph paper.

"So, what have you discovered?" Marcie asked, watching the instructor go to the seismograph and manipulate the paper between his hands, perusing the sierra of the recorded tremors, like a banker looking through a ticker tape.

Then, he held up a length of the paper and pointed to a thick graph line. "Here! The tremors have been hitting us for a few months, now, and as a geologist, I've been recording a lot of incredible data from them. But then, about a month and a half ago, my seismograph had been picking up what I thought, at first, were just odd pulses generated in the tremors. After I studied the pulses, I realized that they're almost rhythmic, repeating the same three-part patterns over and over. See?"

Marcie looked down at the section on paper, and after a few moments of study, she too, could see a surprisingly constant tattoo of pulses, in triplicate, drawn onto the sheet.

"I see them, Professor," Marcie said. "Have you shown this to anybody else?"

"I was going to take my findings to the National Geological Committee, but I guess you got to me, first."

Before another thing was said between them, the brass and needled arm of the seismograph started to wiggle, vigorously, and scribble the approach of another incoming earthquake.

Incredibly, it felt as if the whole university was about to buck and shimmy in its foundation, as vibrations moved through the room and its occupants, like a living force, turning Marcie and Babcock's balance into the capricious land's plaything.

Babcock held tight to the edges of the desk, as it began to slide, slightly, to the side. He glanced over at the new scrawls on the graph sheet and exclaimed, "It's happening, again! It's the same triple pulse pattern as before! There's evil afoot! I just know it!"

Marcie reached over to steady herself on a desk on the front row, and then heard something that probably shouldn't have been occurring, but somehow was. An explosion, close, but not coming from the interior of the school. Which meant that it might have happened outside on the campus.

"Nitro!" she exclaimed to herself, and then pushed herself through the rapidly undone lab and out of the door, eager to catch, or at least, see this culprit in the flesh to make her report to Iron Will.

Careening along the walls of the hall, Marcie could see classrooms' doors swayed open, panicked students and teachers vacating them, and their furnishings up-ended, while plaster dust fell, like snow, around her head.

Finally, she managed to reach the main entrance, tumbled out of its archway and fell onto a miniature battlefield that was once a bucolic campus. People ran into the cardinal directions away from a single figure who stood in the center of the quad, looking as pleased, as he was dangerous.

Marcie carefully stood upright on uneven legs and walked closer to the man who proceeded to take a matchstick from his pocket, scratch it to life with a calloused thumb, and ignite a short-fuse bomb with a bitter chuckle, all while on a balanced stance.

From a distance, he looked like a rough, hard-living Mexican bandito, tan and unshaven with unkempt hair curling out from a wide brimmed hat. His threadbare clothes were covered by a dingy poncho, but his smoked-glass spectacles caught the light of the match head with an almost maniacal gleam.

"Nitro!" Marcie called out, getting his attention for a moment.

He looked at her, with a quizzical grin, figuring that she was some silly student, on a fool's errand, to try and stop him, possibly by trying to talk sense into him. She would soon know otherwise.

"Why aren't you in class, dearie?" he jested.

"Shutting down criminals is my extra-curricular activity!" she quipped back, reaching into one of the pouches of her utility belt.

While the fuse sputtered and shrank, Nitro quickly looked for his next target, and found it within the arched entrance of a nearby auditorium, whose closed, yet out-swinging double doors kept a small knot of panic-stricken students and faculty members from rushing into the building by dint of them pushing and beating against it.

"Try lawn bowling!" he yelled, giving the hissing weapon a toss in the building's direction. The bomb tumbled and rolled along the grass, then, it hopped from the edge of the turf and bounced across the pavement, up to the single, marble stair that led up to the building's entrance and the terrified people crowding the closed-off threshold.

It came to rest on its side by the step, the fuse, a scant inch from burning into the detonator. Marcie pulled her hand free from the pouch, an Insta-Ice capsule poised in her fingers.

Where Nitro proved to have practiced balance to pull off his crimes in the middle of an earthquake, long use of her various capsules proved that Marcie had just as good an aim, as she turned and pitched the invention hard, which covered the distance to the pavement in seconds.

Deflecting off the ground, the cracked casing splashed its coolant wide across the paving stones and coated over the bomb. In the bare seconds remaining, the liquid solidified into a sheet of ice that encased the bomb and the ground around it, snuffing out its fuse millimeters away from the gunpowder inside.

The people crammed in the entrance, realizing that they weren't going to get to safety that way, took the opportunity to sprint out of the threshold to more distant parts of the quad.

"Back of the class, Nitro!" Marcie taunted the fuming man, hoping that he wouldn't try that stunt, again. Without access to a decent chemical lab, she could only use the few Insta-Ices left to her.

"Why you-" Nitro growled. He stuck both hands under his poncho, moved them towards his back, and pulled out two dark, metal spheres, each etched with an equatorial groove along them, and wrapped in silken cloth.

"Try my para-bombs, you meddlesome bookworm!" he yelled at her, before throwing the two balls over her head.

Marcie realized, too late, that in saving the people from the earlier bomb, she had brought herself too far out in the open. Wherever those bombs would land, she knew that she wouldn't be able to get to any cover before then.

Then, the strangest thing happened. The cloth around the bombs blossomed to become parachutes, which caught the air, drifting the spheres down above her.

As Marcie began to back away, looking for a place to duck into or behind, the base of an intact statue commemorating a Darrow patron, caught her attention, and she ran towards it.

Unbeknownst to her, or anybody still in the ruined area, the two descending weapons were running on internal, clockwork mechanisms activated by Nitro before he pulled them from his poncho, and when time was up, the bottom hemispheres of the bombs opened small, equidistant ports and began to rotate, furiously, spewing glass capsules of nitro-glycerin in all directions, via centrifugal force.

The capsules impacted and exploded with everything exposed to them, painfully knocking down rubberneckers, destroying beautiful facades, and perforating the campus grounds and promenade with smoking craters.

Marcie kept her head down as the ground shook under the bombardment. A blast of marble shards showered over her, and she raised her head with a start, when the bulk of the statue, crippled by a nitro-capsule to the knee, lost stability and fell beside her on the soft lawn, almost crushing her prone body.

By then, the quakes had subsided. Straining her ears to listen for any sign of Nitro through the screams and yells of the scholars and instructors, Marcie wearily stood up, using the broken statue's base as leverage.

She looked around, while an afternoon breeze began to clear the smoke from the yard, and spotted the two, now defunct, weapons, lying impotently on the grass.

"Nineteenth-century cluster bombs?" Marcie muttered, leaning against the base. "Color me impressed."

Finally, she could begin to see the vista of the wealthy neighborhood surrounding of the campus through the clearing miasma, but she knew that when she made it back to the sheriff, she would have to report that Nitro had, unfortunately, fled the scene.


	3. 3

_3~_

Jason sat by a table in the Sheriff's Office, reading a copy of the town's newspaper, _The Crystal Crier_.

He was perusing through an article concerning the recent death of a local legend, a gold prospector in another part of California named Oswald Nugent, who's uncanny ability to detect gold veins by the particular scent of the earth surrounding it, gave him the nickname, Nugget Nose.

His death was unsolved, as no suspects were found, but the reporter who wrote the article went with the notion that foul play was the cause, either because Oswald wouldn't lend his ability to other, more ruthless miners or claim jumpers, or he was eliminated by those same competitors, because they felt that he was becoming too successful.

Jason shook his head at the tragedy. He hadn't given it much thought, but now that he was living in such a time as this, gold's corrupting allure was proving to be openly, dangerously, and distressingly all too real.

The front door creaked open behind him, and a tired Marcie Fleach schlepped in and leaned against the bars of one of the holding cells.

"Man! Aren't we supposed to ride horses or something?" she gasped. "I'm beat. Hey, Jason, where's the sheriff?"

"He left with some guy from City Hall. Don't know when he'll be back," he said before going back to reading.

Forgetting her fatigue, Marcie quickly stood up and walked over to Sheriff Williamson's desk. "Good. Now, I've got a chance."

"To do what?" Jason asked, absently.

"To look for that case file," Marcie said, rooting through the desk. Jason turned his head to her, troubled.

"I don't thing the sheriff'll like that, Marcie," he warned. "We're only operating outside of a jail cell because we're on his good graces. Why mess that up?"

"Trust me, Jason, that's the last thing I want, but I don't want to wait until this mystery is solved before I can move on to Velma's case, either. Who knows how long that'll be? But, there might be something in the file that ol' Iron Will might've missed, some clue that his Old West mind probably couldn't grasp."

"But, Marcie, they wouldn't have made him sheriff just for laughs," Jason fretted before he gasped quietly. From his position in the office, he could saw Will walk in, and then stand behind Marcie, while she stood with her back to him and the door, continuing the search.

So focused was she on the desk's open drawers, that Marcie didn't even hear her friend's inhalation.

"I know, but we're from the future, so we have the advantage in reasoning," she figured. "This may be a more primitive time, and all, but I think-"

"Ahem!" came the throaty growl of Sheriff Williamson.

Marcie bolted upright from the desk, leaving a disheveled pile of papers in her guilty wake. "What? Uh, Sheriff! I, uh...hello?"

"I know that out here we may do things pretty backward compared to what you're probably used to in New York, but I think I do alright with the brains I've been given. Now, come with me, little lady. We're going to have a talk," the man drawled, then stepped outside to await her.

Cleaning up her mess, she whispered, sarcastically, "Thanks for warning me, _Jason_."

Jason gave a pensive shrug. "He snuck up on me! He's like some...cowboy _ninja_!"

With the papers stacked on the desk to be sorted through later, she groaned, "Ugh! Whatever," and walked out.

* * *

Marcie saw the sheriff leaning against the railing of the office's front porch, with his back turned to her, and reluctantly started the conversation, hoping to mitigate the trouble she was in.

"I, uh, thought you were at the Mayor's Office, getting chewed out," she said.

"I'm too tough," he shrugged with a grunt. "They know that chewing _me_ out's like breaking teeth on a rawhide strap. But, I thought I told you to help me with this case, first, before you go poking around in the other one."

Marcie brought up her hands, beseechingly. "I know, and I'm sorry. I _will_ help you out. I'm a girl of my word, I…just wanted to take a quick look at the file, and then put it back."

The fact that Will didn't reply, gave Marcie the impression that he didn't believe her capabilities or intentions.

"I'm _smart_!" she pressed. "I _can_ work on both cases. You can depend on me."

Will glanced at her. "Girl, you're way too young to be this stubborn. I don't know how things are done in New York, but around here, deputies follow the sheriff's orders."

"And I will," she countered. "But, I have to do what I came here to do, as well."

"And you won't back down from that, even if I locked you up for insubordination?"

Marcie thought about that. He would be in his rights to do so, and she was certainly capable of burning her way out, later, but she wanted there to be a mutual trust between parties that would get things done more efficiently. Still, she wanted him to know that she was as determined to succeed in her own mission, as she would have been successful with his.

"No," she, finally, said to him. "I can't, and I won't."

Will ruminated that bold decision, and then gave a sigh. "When I was younger and didn't know a hat from a hole in the ground, my pappy told me that there were two kinds of people in this old world. Those who can stand, and those who can't, and sometimes, those who can stand take advantage of those who can't. I learned not to stand for _that_ , so I made this my life, to do good for people who weren't strong enough to stand on their own."

He stood from the railing, turned to face her and leaned back on the railing, again. "I suppose it sounds strange to hear, but I can't help seeing a little bit of me in you."

He saw one of her eyebrows rise in reaction to that, and quickly said, "Don't go, entirely, thinking that's a compliment. You look like you want to see your share of questions answered, justice done, and your people safe. On the face of it, there's nothing wrong with that, especially if you want to make a _life_ of that, but I don't want you following down the same trail I went."

That struck Marcie as odd. What did he ever do in life that warranted such a warning?

"What do you mean?" she asked, suddenly interested.

"I made a decision, long ago, to make my career, or maybe my cause, mean something, even if I wound up turning my back on my family's problems, or the promise of better days with someone special in my life," he admitted.

"I'm not obsessing, if that's what you mean," she said, defensively, even though she questioned, for a moment, if that was truly accurate. "Besides, why didn't you go into something, like politics, if you felt like you were giving too much up to help others?"

"Don't be fooled by what you see, little lady" he said. "I may look like a man of extremes, but I'm not. I don't have a face for politics, and living off bounties don't suit me. So, I live in the middle. I don't take no guff from anybody, but I do what I can for the people."

Marcie didn't want to readily admit it, but this little chat was giving her access to more insight on the man than she expected, and her opinions about him, which she, initially, chalked up to her contentious dealings with Sheriff Stone, were starting to change, in spite of her defensiveness.

"Well, I traveled through...great distances to see Velma, again," Marcie told him. "I can't go back without her, and I'm _not_ going home until I find her. If you were me, you'd be turning over every rock to do the same."

Will gave a thoughtful nod at that. "I figure you're right, but the problem with turning over rocks, is that if you're not careful, you could wind up buried."

Marcie said nothing after that. He would have just countered any argument she gave to justify her transgression, with more of his honest, hard-earned words of frontier law enforcement wisdom. All she could do was await the punishment that would come after that admonishment.

"But, you said that you'd help, and I trust you," he, slowly, decided to say, with a smile so faint, only a powerful microscope would have been able to detect it. "I see that you're the type of person who stands. Plus, you're standing up to me for the right reasons, because you want to help someone special in _your_ life. You're right. I would have done the same. You can look at my file, if you want. It was just collecting dust, anyways. Maybe you can make better use out of it than I did."

Inside Marcie, the sun rose. "Thank you, Sheriff! Thank you! We really appreciate it."

Will tilted his head, quizzically. "Who's 'we?'"

She smiled. "Velma and I, sir."

Marcie stepped over to him and, unashamedly, gave him a grateful hug that made his creased face redden, fiercely. He stiffened, growing more and more awkward and emotionally dumbstruck, rare things for such a no-nonsense lawman to feel, to say the very least.

"Womenfolk," he grunted.

From their vantage point the two could see Red and Daisy walking together up the street towards them. After Marcie waved them in to meet on the porch, Will asked her what happened at the University.

"Well, I thought that the dean would have been more cooperative, but I found the best lead from a Professor Babcock, who was monitoring the quakes."

Approaching the porch and overhearing Marcie give her report, Red chimed in with his own.

"Well, Sheriff," he said. "I questioned the manager of one of the businesses that got hit, one of those general stores, and he says that only description they got of that Nitro guy, after he stole a wagon full of feed and food, was one of those calling cards that he keeps leaving behind. Since when does a thief need business cards?"

"I've got that beat," Daisy said. "I talked to an employee of a Darrow-owned factory who said that, last month, he saw Nitro leave on a wagon loaded with chemicals, tools and machine parts from there. I wanted to ask what exactly was stolen, but that tremor rolled into town, and scared him off."

"Hmm, I'll see your calling card and your eyewitness report, and raise you a direct run in with the guy on the campus," Marcie said to them.

"What? You saw him?" Will asked her, eager for any new information. "What does he look like?"

"A Mexican bandit, believe it or not," she shrugged. "Yeah, I know. Pretty anti-climactic. You'd think there'd be more to it than that, but nope. Pretty good tinkerer, though."

"Hey, Sheriff," Daisy asked. "Please tell me that Crystal Cove has one of those telegraph things."

"Yeah, there's a telegraph station in town," Will nodded. "Why?"

"If we have to canvas the whole town on foot, while we're looking for clues, then we've got to network, somehow."

"Yeah," Red concurred. "Otherwise, we're going to run ourselves ragged trying to get from here to there."

"Do you even know how to use a telegraph?" Jason asked, coming out of the office, after overhearing him.

"No," Red said, as Marcie stepped back into the office. "Do you, Jellyfish?"

"No," Jason said, defensively. "But that's only because it's not a widely accepted part of our high school curriculum, yet."

"Don't let him get to you, Jason," Marcie said, sorting through the papers she placed on the desk for the won case file. "I don't know much Morse Code, myself. I'd get lost in all of that tapping. I wouldn't know what I..."

She felt as though she was transfixed by a lightning bolt. "No way! No way! That's it!"

"What's it?" Will asked from the porch.

"A break in the case, Sheriff!" she yelled on her way back out to see him, all thoughts of the case file, forgotten. "Professor Babcock said that the tremors he detected had a rhythm to them, a pattern. That's because it was Morse Code! Somebody's out there making those earthquakes!"

"Artificially?" Jason asked, dubiously. "That's a heck of a theory. Do you know who?"

"Who else?" Marcie crowed, loudly. " _My Velma!_ She sending a message for help!"

Her friends, silently, gave puzzled and doubtful glances at her and to each other, concerning her theory, and the near-obsession she seemed to exhibit around Velma, lately.

Marcie could sense the disbelief radiating from them and pressed her argument. "I'm telling you, it's her! I don't know how she's doing it, but I know it's her!"

"Your friend?" Will replied, not seeing how any of it could be done, either, but, skeptically, acknowledging the nebulous possibility of a connection. "You think she might be mixed up in all of this, huh? Well, if what you're saying is factual, then that's mighty clever on her part."

"Of course, it's clever! That's my girl!" Marcie, proudly, praised. "And if Nitro knows when an earthquake occurs before he makes his move, then it stands to reason that he could have something to do with V's disappearance. I think I just solved two mysteries with the same clue!"

"Whoa! A double deduction?" Jason gasped at the phenomenon.

"Sheriff, I've got to get back to the University and get more information from that professor I met!" Marcie entreated.

"All right, then," Will said, giving her leave with a curt nod. "It sounds like you've got something to go on, and I'm no good talking with them long-hairs. When you finish, come on back, so we can plan what to do, next."

"Yes, sir! I'll be back, guys!" she called out to them, jogging down the street. From her friends' point of view, however, she practically skipped.

* * *

Marcie stepped her way through the damaged hall, curiously glancing up at the intact ceiling with its ugly patches where plaster was now absent.

Outside, the university's tower bell rang, signaling the end of the final classes. Classroom doors swung opened along the plaster dust-coated corridor, allowing students to file out and chatter amongst themselves over the chaos of the day, while Marcie maneuvered past them to reach the emptying classroom/laboratory of Professor Amos Babcock.

After waiting for the last student to depart, Marcie stepped inside, surreptitiously, and strolled up to Babcock's desk.

Seeing someone approach from the corner of his eye and thinking that it was a student who wanted him once more, today, he glanced from his packing, then recognized Marcie.

"Ah, you came back!" he replied, gesturing to a clock on the far wall. "You're just in time. I just finished my last class for today. Scuttlebutt has it that poor Dean Gardner's been tearing his hair out because of all the new damage Nitro caused that the school has to pay for."

The thought of the obstinate dean, literally, tearing his hair free from financial frustration, made Marcie smirk. "Yeah, I was there when he and I…rumbled. But, why would he attack the school, again? I thought he got it all out of his system the last time he came through."

Babcock gave a confused shrug. "According to the letter he left before he scurried off, he decided to teach the Darrows another lesson because, and I quote, 'the university was too big a building not to give it a refresher course,' end quote. As for you, I thought you were crushed under a collapsed roof, or swallowed whole by the very earth, itself, my dear."

"Not yet," Marcie said. "But, I came by to ask if I could take another look at the graph you showed me, earlier, and if you found anything new with your instruments?"

He waved to a coiling length of graph paper that had flowed from the, now, still seismograph and its table. "I haven't packed them away, yet," he told her. "So, look, quickly."

She went over and picked up one end of the unfurled sheet and studied the pulses, once more. Three rapid oscillations were drawn by the machine, followed by a series of three, widely-spaced oscillations, and then, ending in a return of the first set of pulses.

"SOS," Marcie whispered to herself, understanding the vital message with grateful satisfaction.

"As for me discovering anything more significant, I have, as a matter of fact. I've worked out a trilaterational calculation based on the tremors' strength, speed and distance when it reached town, and I'm very sure that I've found, what the esteemed Robert Mallet called, the epicenter."

Babcock picked up a rolled map from his desk and spread it out for her. "Look here!"

Marcie put aside errant thoughts of rescue to approach the map and look down over it. It wasn't a common map, in that, the only landmark was Crystal Cove and the greenish territory surrounding it before it, gradually, turned into arid wilderness. Concentric, color-coded seismic event zones dominated the map, off-center.

The smallest zone in the area had an x drawn in its center, so its location had begun to intrigue her. She pointed to it.

"What's that?"

"Well, this isoseismic map shows the general location of the epicenter," Babcock explained. "Whatever is causing the quakes is coming from that area."

"Then, we'll need to go there," she decided. Nitro, and hopefully, by extension, Velma, might be in that area. "Could I borrow this for a little while? The sheriff will need to know what's out there before we can investigate further."

She could see the silent debate playing out in Babcock's face. He may have wanted to help, but he, also, feared the loss of his hard work.

Finally, he said, "Well, you listened to me, and if my findings can help the sheriff stop these infernal earthquakes and bring that Nitro to justice...then you may borrow my map. But, _please_ endeavor to return it intact, so I may take my findings to the National Geology Committee."

"You got it," Marcie promised, rolling the map from the desktop.

"I know," the professor said, slightly confused. "I'm giving it to you."

"What?" she asked.

"The map."

"I got you," Marcie acknowledged.

Confused, again, Babcock attempted to clarify. "No, you want my _map_. Take good care of it."

"I will," she said, heading out the door. "Thanks!"

The professor shrugged away the earlier miscommunication and resumed packing his personal effects away. Then, Marcie walked back to the doorway and peeked inside.

"Uh, Professor Babcock," she asked, sheepishly. "Would you, by any chance, own a horse?"

* * *

The male teller sighed, as he finished another customer's tedious transaction behind his side of the window.

He absently recalled a riveting dime novel he read, recently, that had him wishing for the spirited life of a sailor, explorer, or soldier. Life as a bank teller, even for one as prestigious as the Crystal Cove Savings and Loan, was not what he would call inspiring.

With his face pointed down to look at some receipts, he heard the shuffle of feet, as another customer approached him.

"How may I help you, today," he asked by rote, not bothering to look up, just yet, and see this new person. "Would you like to deposit, withdraw, or take out a loan?"

He heard a low chuckle, which prompted him to lift his head to see what was funny, and found himself staring at a swarthy man in a big hat, early sunglasses, and a toothy grin. He lifted his poncho away slightly to reveal a bandoleer loaded with dynamite.

As if he were staring down a rattlesnake, the teller froze, wide-eyed, as Nitro leaned in and whispered, "Even better, amigo. I want to break the bank!"

* * *

The forward windows of the bank manger's second story office gave a fair view of the neighborhood to Nitro, as he peeked past its tied-back curtains. The manager, himself, sat rigid behind his desk, his eyes never straying from the stick of dynamite brandished loosely in the criminal's hand.

"I-I don't understand. From what I gathered, around town, you want to hurt the Darrows," the confused executive said. "If you want to steal the Darrows' money and valuables, they're in the strongroom in the basement, along with all of the savings of the good people of Crystal Cove. I can take you to it, and no one has to be hurt."

"I'm obliged," said Nitro, walking from the window to the desk, driving the manager to heightened terror by, lightly, tossing and catching the dynamite stick in his hand. "But, you have to admit that it's pretty hard to steal a whole bank."

"What?" The manager asked, his confusion only intensified. "Look, why not let the people go, Nitro? You have what you want. You don't need them."

"Oh, but I do," the criminal said, smugly. "And thank you for telling your other tellers to keep working, as if nothing was going on. I didn't have to waste time impressing on you the importance of that. Now, the teller who I let go should have the law coming by shortly, which means, sir, that it's time for you to give the performance of a lifetime!"

* * *

The door of the Sheriff's Office opened to a sedate scene. Iron Will, Jason, Daisy and Red sat around the singular table in the room, playing a focused game of Gin Rummy to pass the time.

The sound of the door broke the players from their strategies and they looked to the familiar figure walking in.

"You made it back," Daisy replied, then she asked what most in the room were already thinking, "What are you wearing?"

To maintain her identity as a deputy, Marcie approached them in an ensemble of brown pants and boots, a yellow shirt, tan vest, and a red bandanna tied loosely around her neck. Encircling her thin waist was an old, leather gun belt with filled and stoppered test tubes where bullets would be held. Due to the masculine cut of the clothes, the whole outfit made Marcie looked noticeably androgynous.

"Well, the professor gave me a lift on his horse, but I didn't secure my chemicals well enough and some acid leaked out, burning holes in my skirt," she explained. "I had to make a detour to Penway's to get some new duds, fast. Duds. Now, _I'm_ talking like a native."

"Lady, you look like a dude, and on my tab, too, I reckon," Will groused, darkly.

Marcie hung her head, sheepishly. "Uh, yeah. I'm sorry about that, Sheriff, but look on the bright side. The horse was fine. Imagine what you'd have to pay for a new horse."

"I can," he huffed. "Now, do you have any leads?"

"Oh, yeah! I've got a doozie!" Marcie crowed, while she walked over to the table and unfurled the isoseismic map over their playing cards.

"Aw, I was winning!" Daisy complained.

"What's that?" the sheriff asked her. "It looks like a map."

"It is. It's a special map created by Professor Babcock. It shows where the earthquakes are coming from." She pointed to the central area in the map's concentric zones. "He said that they're coming from this area. Since you probably know every rock and bush around here, I was hoping you might know what was out there."

Will gave his already hard, squinty eyes a hard, thoughtful squint at the map, running the locations of natural landmarks and human habitations through his mind, until he came to an answer.

"Well," he ruminated, rubbing his lantern jaw. "I can tell you square that there's nothing out there except sand, cactus, rattlers, and more sand."

"Oh," Marcie said, dejectedly, wondering how she was going to find Velma in all of that local desert.

"And one place," Will added. "Some played-out, piss-ant of a ghost town called Scorpion Wells. That's as good a place as any for somebody to hide from the law."

The sheriff stood up from the table, feeling the rush that came from, finally, tracking down his quarry before the capture, or the kill. "Looks like this is it, deputies," he said to them. "We've got the best lead we've had in months to track that snake down. Let's saddle up."

"You mean...on a _horse_?" Jason spoke up. "Seriously? We get to ride horses?"

"Unless you're fixing to fly there."

Suddenly, all turned to the sound of the front door opening, again, and a fatigued bank teller staggered into the office. He hunched over, holding his shaking knees to steady himself and to catch his breath, while the deputies barraged him with questions.

"Who are you?"

"You look out of breath. Do you have asthma?"

"Do you want the sheriff?"

"Is there anything we can do for you?"

Iron Will bore his presence on the ragged man and, directly, asked, "Alright, friend. What's the trouble?"

The teller raised his trembling head, inhaled, and gave a one word reply.

"Nitro!" he, desperately, yelled.


	4. 4

_4~_

On horseback, Marcie, like the others, bobbled unsteadily on the large, living thing, hoping that it simply followed wherever the sheriff's horse went, since she was sure that she wasn't familiar yet with steering the animal through rein tugs and body language.

She couldn't complain about its speed, however, as the team made it to the periphery of the bank in just minutes, after acquiring the horses from the local stable.

Outside, the bank seemed and sounded normal to her. People moved about through the neighborhood. Some, even, entered the bank, while others, calmly, left. But, according to the harried bank teller, the notorious Nitro was holed up in there, which made the back of her mind itch with a question: why would he rob a bank in the middle of the day, alone, and without the cover of the tremors?

Her thoughts were interrupted by the command giving by Iron Will.

"Alright," he told them, as he dismounted. "It looks quiet, so I'm going to go in there and check it out. You all stay out here, and keep your eyes peeled, in case of trouble."

Will cautiously approached the bank, and wasn't a yard from its entrance, before he heard a voice cry out, "It's Nitro! He's upstairs! He's in the building!"

He just had time to jump aside, as a stampede of panicked humanity crashed out of the front doors. Time was wasting with that mad bomber, and he wanted to tear inside and grab the him, but the rush of people made that almost impossible.

Finally, the crowd passed, and Will rushed into the building. He flew through the tellers' entrance, and past the rear door of the tellers' station that led to the first floor corridor which ran outside of subordinate offices and storage rooms, to the staircase that led to second floor's executive offices.

There, he stopped to open, or kick in those office doors in search of Nitro, but he was, frustratingly, absent in them.

Finally, after running back out to the corridor, he spotted the door to the bank manager's office, up ahead.

When he opened the door and saw Nitro sitting by the window, with his back to Will, the sheriff gave an grim smile and savored his approach.

"I've been waiting quite a while to catch up to you, Nitro. You've been a burr under my saddle for far too long."

He came alongside the seated man, with readied handcuffs, quickly grabbed a wrist and

restrained it, securing the other cuff to himself.

"You're under arrest," Will muttered in satisfaction.

Nitro, as a reply, gave a muffled yell and stomped his rather expensively shoed feet.

Confused, Will swatted Nitro's large hat away with his free hand, revealing the dark-spectacled face of a terrified bank manager.

"What the-" Will sputtered, as he unlocked the cuffs from the man, and then yanked the bandanna and gag from his mouth. "What's going on, here?"

" _Nitro_ was here!" the managed gasped. "We've got to get out! He's going to blow up the bank!"

Will needed no more encouragement. Realizing that the man was probably bound, as well as gagged, Will pulled a knife from his boot, lifted the faux Nitro's poncho away, and cut the manager free. Then, they both started to run from the office, before seeing a chilling sight.

Placed along the wainscoting of the wall of the office door, where an entering Will wouldn't have noticed until he looked back, were lit sticks of dynamite. The trap had already been sprung.

"Move it!" Will yelled, as both men tore through the second floor and scrambled down the stairs, hoping that they still had time. Through the first floor corridor, they could see hissing sticks of explosive sitting in the wall lamps, unnoticed by Will when he first rushed in, and in the deserted tellers' station, there were a few more, sputtering on the floor, their fuses, almost spent.

The sheriff kicked the double doors away, and both men sprinted hard from the doomed building.

"Get back! Everybody, get back!" Will roared to the crowd that milled further outside the bank. Luckily, they didn't hesitate, understanding what Nitro was capable of, and they scattered down every available street.

From where Marcie and the others were, they could see their sheriff still running at top speed towards them. Then, on an otherwise clear day, they all heard the thunder.

In one moment, there was a thriving, necessary bank of the community, serving to safeguard their savings and provide loans for their homes, in the next, it was a cloud of glass shards, splinters and plaster dust carried along the expanding pressure wave of a frightening explosion.

Marcie and Jason found themselves on the ground, immediately thrown from their spooked horses. Red and Daisy managed to hang on, but they were losing control of their, now, anxious mounts, who were endeavoring to walk from the area.

Will slowly got up from where the shock wave battered him down, dusted off the debris with his hat, and walked gingerly towards the rattled deputies, holding his back.

Marcie was already trying to calm her steed, when she noticed his approach.

"Are you all right?" she asked, shakily.

"I haven't felt like this since my rodeo days," the sheriff muttered. "It was a trap, but I'll live. How are the others holding up?"

Marcie saw her fellow deputies recover and begin helping each other bring their horses back. "I think we're fine. Did Nitro die in the explosion?"

Will's face twisted into a mask of frustration and loathing. "Naw. That dirty snake wasn't even there. He dressed the bank manager as him, and then slithered out, somehow, before the place went up."

"He might have slipped out with the crowd went they ran from the bank," she reasoned. "What do we do, now?"

Will went to his horse, who was far too inured to Will's loud, violent lifestyle to bolt, mounted him, and said, "We've got the map. We know where he'll get to, so I'm splitting us up. Jason and Daisy will stay in town, in case Nitro's fool enough to stick around and attack again. The rest of us are going to ride out and haul him back here to face justice."

"Why do _I_ have to stay behind?" Daisy complained, after overhearing. "It's because I'm a woman, isn't it?"

"Daisy, I'm a woman, and I have to go," Marcie said.

"You're not a woman, you're just a girl," Daisy scoffed, hotly, before turning her attention back to the sheriff. "And you're an ageist. You think I'm too _old_ to go!"

If Daisy's aspersion of Marcie affected her, she didn't reveal it, as she continued. "Daisy, you have to stay behind. Think about it. If the sheriff's right, and Nitro _is_ still in town, then you're needed, here, if just to look after Daphne and keep her safe, while we're gone."

It was Daphne's name that suddenly provided the ice cold water needed to wake Daisy from her Western fantasy and see the importance of the job that she was sworn into, and the lives that she swore to protect.

She looked as though she awoke from a dream, remembered what she had just said to Marcie, and then, guiltily, looked at her, the shame of her hasty words darkening her face.

"Oh, Marcie, I'm-I'm so sorry that I said that about you. I wasn't thinking. You are every bit a woman," Daisy said, pained, the very memory of her slander, now, making her wince. "You're a sight more mature than how _I'm_ acting, that's for sure. I'll stay."

She looked to Jason and told him, "Let's get back to the office and listen out for more calls."

As the two slowly rode away, Will guided his horse to Marcie.

"Thanks for that," he said to her, with a solemn nod. "I was right. I _do_ see a little of me in you."

"Thanks," she said, quietly. "I know she didn't mean it. I guess with all that's happening, we get carried away, sometimes. So, we're going to look for Nitro, huh? In that case, since we half-deputies aren't allowed any weapons, we're going to need something to even the odds."

"Like what?"

"We've got to go shopping!"

Will's face fell from that. "Aw, now don't make me regret what I said to you, earlier. We ain't got time for all of this foolishness."

"Trust me, Sheriff, we do. I have an idea."

"Ugh! Just like a woman," he groused. "Always thinking that shopping will, somehow, solve all the world's problems. Can you, at least, tell me what we're getting, before you run up my tab even more, and I wind up in debtor's prison?"

"Not a lot," she coaxed. "We just a few ingredients. Some leather bags, needle and thread...and cornstarch. _Lots_ of cornstarch."

* * *

They appeared as three centaurs with broad hats, walking in the distance. In the heat shimmer and errant dust devils, they seemingly shifted in and out of the reality and vision of anyone braving the desert, that day.

One led the other two, who kept a steady pace with him on either side. Occasionally, the leader would raise his arm, ordering the others to stop, lean towards the ground for a moment, and then signal that it was time to move on, again.

This was a matter of course, in the trek. Every so often, Sheriff Will would halt the procession to read the sand or hardpan for recent hoof prints and disturbed surroundings, the clues he lived by when tracking fugitives in these badlands.

Resuming the hunt, the dry wind rustled against his hair and the brim of his weathered hat, as Will looked over the desert that the pursuit had taken him. From his perspective, both figuratively and literally, he had found an unexpected peace come over him.

Across the rose-painted mountains and expansive plains of the ever-living Californian desert, this proud, simple man could see its own simplistic beautiful, not complicated by buildings, people and politics. Under the almost hypnotic sound of his horse's slow hoof beats, Will's mind quieted, as the vast, blue, open sky was quiet, moving hills of clouds by whim, like errant thoughts.

The case wasn't just vexing to him, he realized. Life, in its accelerated flow towards change was, too. People didn't think like they once had, concentrating on bending the wilderness to their aims to survive, and counting on a strong sense of morals to get them through the challenges of the day.

Bad people existed, too, he knew, but their motivations and plots were just as uncomplicated, then. The mere acquisition of ready money, or a gunslinger's reputation was enough for them. Now, with the burgeoning of villages into towns, and towns into cities, new spirits came to settle in them: political ambitions, rampant technological progress, and elaborate revenge. And when these spirits clashed, they made things, admittedly, harder on the lawman, to the point where he would need the assistance of some badly-dressed strangers from the east.

He would do his duty and bring in his man. As long as he was alive, nothing would change that, but out here, Will saw something his soul sorely lacked from the relatively fast-paced lifestyle his career in Crystal Cove had led him. Peace of mind.

Continuing to gaze out at the panorama of the wilderness before him, the warm breeze speaking only to him, now that he slowed down long enough to listen, Will saw the lonely, peaceful land beyond the cities and towns, and saw the core of himself reflected in it.

"Hey, I think I see something," Red spoke up, pointing to what looked to be a squat, low skyline in the hazy distance.

"That's it," Will grunted. "That's Scorpion Wells. We'll come in, all slow and quiet, and get the drop on him."

The history of Scorpion Wells was one of speed. Iron veins were found in the depths of a nearby mountain, one with such a devilish reputation for quickly dispatching miners in lethal, sulfur gas pockets and sudden cave-ins, that the locals named it Diabla.

Despite the calamitous attrition rate of miners, there, the lure of profit prompted the swift creation of the mining town of Scorpion Wells. Its rapid growth was reflected in its even faster depletion of iron ore from the mountain, and when it was understood that there was no more iron to be had in the area, the citizens left, and the town, itself, died a mercurial death.

The same, however, could not be said for Diabla. The mountain, already reputed to having a malevolent life of her own, shivered from within, her sides, venting plumes of unnoticed sulfur into the sky, and within her depths, she harbored an even deadlier secret.

A magma chamber, relatively small by most standards, was seething. Once held captive by hundreds of thousands of tons of earth, its hold around her primal heart had weakened, due to the constant, pounding waves of tremors that radiated from the nearby town.

Now, that heart beat with a pressure that built up, steadily, day by day, to the point where she was, now, a ticking time bomb with the power to undo the immediate region. However, at the moment, Diabla had yet to find her terrible voice.

Will spotted fresh tracks cutting through the town's boundary, so the three riders rode cautiously through the outskirts of the ghost town's husk, its weather-beaten buildings standing like silent sentries, like the dry, old bones of ruins, still preserved in their sun-faded moments of prosperity.

Marcie's head swiveled, nervously, in reaction to the odd creak of desiccated wood panels, or the low moan of a desert wind blowing near-musically through a ramshackle roof.

Heading further in, the trio followed the hoof prints into a small, commercial quarter of town, where they saw something quite unusual.

Hanging over the tall facade of The Firetail, an aged, once red-painted, two-story hotel and brothel possibly christened in the naming convention of the town's scorpion theme, was a small blimp anchored to its roof by mooring ropes and possessing a railed, outer deck that encircled the blimp's gondola.

Across the street, the tracks led to a lone horse was hitched to a post outside of the maw of a roofed stable in very harsh condition.

Will whispered everyone to dismount outside of the stable and hitch their horses, there. When they did, everyone quietly walked over to the faded-white, railed front porch of the hotel, which seemed to stare at them with its aged, architectural elements.

Deciding that the two men would be fine, curiosity got the better of Marcie, and she strolled over to one of the building's two dusty front windows, and peered in.

"What do you see?" Red asked, as he and Will glanced up and down the sandy street for signs of a coming trouble.

"The lobby's seen better days, but I don't see anybody," she reported, directing her attention to what looked like a large ziggurat through the dirty glass. "There's a big machine in the middle of the room. I wonder what it is."

"We'll ask Nitro when we see him," the sheriff muttered, then reached for the doorknobs of the hotel's double entrance doors. They were locked and held fast to his quiet jiggering.

"I've got this," Marcie whispered, pulling a bulb syringe from her pocket. She squeezed the thick solution, within, into the lock, drew out enough of it to form a crude tail of a handle, and, after breaking it from the syringe, gripped it between her thumb and forefinger and gave it a twist. The lock turned and clicked open.

"Well, I'll be roped and tied," swore Will. "How did you do that?"

"Quick Key," she whispered.

"What? Where did you come by that?"

Marcie gave a smug smile, as she quietly opened the doors. "I made it."

Will followed her into the lobby, beginning to reconsider what he might have thought about his genteel, yet limited opinion of womenfolk, with Red bringing up the rear.

Among the moldy furnishings of the lobby, their eyes scanned every corner, shadow, and piece of furniture large enough to hide an ambusher, eventually focusing on the huge, conical machine that dominated the space in the room.

"What the heck is that?" asked Red.

The look and potential of the device was lost on the two men studying it, but to Marcie, it was a brilliant, brass-fitted fusion of clockworks, crude, yet sophisticated, early electronics, low-frequency, sound producing machinery and raw, coal-fed steam power.

She looked down and, curiously, picked up a sheet of paper that she had stepped on. It revealed the very device they were seeing, but turned on its side, looking like a fat, ironically-designed telescope, mounted on a wagon-wheeled carriage for mobility.

The name of the machine was written above the drawing.

"Geoscope," Marcie read. "Guys, I think this might be the earthquake machine we've been looking for."

Will turned his head to regard her, quizzically. "Earthquake _machine_?"

Marcie shrugged. "What else would make them, if they're artificial? I wonder what that blimp has to do with any of this, though."

The sheriff looked ahead at the large dimensions of the first floor. They had only explored the lobby, and there were still more rooms to search at ground level before they were ready to hunt through the other floors.

Off to one side of the lobby, on a threadbare settee, the trio saw a large bag with the words "Crystal Cove Saving and Loan" stenciled on its side.

"I guess he had time to be a bank robber, after all," Red replied.

"Alright," Will decided. "Me and Red'll check the other rooms, down here. Marcie, you stay in the lobby and watch our backs. Then, we'll start looking upstairs."

"Okay," she said, as the two moved to the front desk, checked behind it, were satisfied, and then stalked through a wide archway where the bar, dinning room, parlor, and kitchen were connected. They were out of sight, soon after.

Marcie went back to the machine standing in the middle of the floor, deciding that further study was preferable to standing in the lobby, like a statue, herself.

Using the diagram she found as a point of reference, she noticed that the device not only looked like a telescope, but in operation, it acted as one, as well. The large base, in its present position, was actually its emitter, resting and pointed into the floor. In its proper position, the whole machine would have been pointed _across_ at something. Something geological, if the device's name was to be inferred.

It was obvious to Marcie that someone had perverted its use, weaponizing it. On first glance, it didn't seem as though Nitro was capable of such repurposing, until he convinced her with their first showdown at the university. Anyone who could make, in essence, cluster bombs, was someone not to be underestimated, in her opinion.

She, reflexively, cocked her head in the direction of the archway, when she heard the faint murmur of a voice. No doubt, Red , or the sheriff, finishing his reconnaissance.

She was about to read about the narrow end of the Geoscope not being the part where the observer's eye would be, but actually a small console, a multi-switch and knob-covered affair, with a ticker tape port built-in that would inform the user of the presence of hard-to-find veins in deep rock, when she heard a voice, again.

She was about to dismiss it, when she noticed that although the sound had came from the direction of her partner and commanding officer, they hadn't appeared, yet. Which only left the staircase, that was just past the archway, and to the side.

If anyone was on the stairs, then they were between her, in the lobby, and the duo, somewhere in the first floor rooms, and could easily ambush them both, if she didn't ambush them, first.

Nervously fingering the test tubes in her gun belt and the small pouch of capsules in her pocket, Marcie gave an anxious sigh, and crept forward.

She held her breath, when she stepped up to the landing, then turned, to creep up the main staircase.

The voice murmured again, and she froze halfway up. From this distance to the second floor, it was remarkably dangerous. She didn't have the advantage of high ground, here, and even though it was a small miracle that the old stairs didn't creak under her weight loud enough to give her away, Marcie wondered how long it would take before that someone upstairs decided to come down and see her unarmed self.

Getting down on all fours, Marcie crawled step by slow, careful step towards the top of the stairs. When she got close enough to the second story to peer along its hallway, she had to stifle a gasp because of whom she saw.

Wearing a replacement hat, glasses, and poncho, Nitro stood, casually, before a closed bedroom door at the end of the hall, and cockily spoke to it, loud enough for Marcie to, finally, hear more clearly.

"I have some good news, as well," he crowed. "All of the scientist's hard work has paid off, and the Geoscope is now ready! It'll be taken to Crystal Cove and placed in the center of town, then the whole town come apart, like a plate in a shooting gallery."

"What do you get out of it, Nitro?" replied another voice, too muffled for Marcie to discern.

"What I always get out of it, Niña. Money!"

"But what about the school children? If the town is hit with a strong enough earthquake, it might set off the dynamite in the school!"

"Oh, that reminds me, you needn't worry about the children," he said, absently. "There was never any dynamite in the school."

"What?"

"Yeah, life is funny that way." Nitro said, giving the door a cold smirk, before he turned and walked in the direction of the stairs.

Panicking, Marcie went flat and let herself slide down a few of the stairs on her belly, to avoid being seen, but all he has to do was reach the head of the stairs to see her, and she was sunk.

Then, he angled his path, walking instead, to another bedroom further up the hall, where he entered and closed the door behind him.

Marcie sighed, relieved, then resumed her ascent, snuck quietly up to the door that Nitro spoke to, and turned the knob. It wouldn't yield for her, so reaching for her bulb syringe, once more, she gave the lock an application of her Quick Key solution.

She gave the door a soft push to open it, then stuck her head inside. The bedroom wasn't the roomiest of places, only offering just enough space to accommodate a bed, night stand, and chamberpot in the windowed rear of the room, and space between the sleeping area and the front door for a single dresser facing a tiny closet.

On the floor, nearby, were sheets of paper scrawled with drawings and rough diagrams of what looked like machines and other devices. One looked familiar to her, resembling a flat-screen television set, so Marcie stepped through the threshold to pick it up for a closer view.

Bending over, also, gave her better view of the floor, particularly the length of chain that ran from one end, that was looped around the foot of the bed's frame, and the other, that snaked to a space behind the open door.

Before she could think more on it, Marcie was rattled by a heavy blow to the back of her head, knocking her hat clear, and bringing her to her knees.

Another blow was forthcoming, when it, suddenly, stopped. That flowing, unruly hair, slim build, and nasally voice, even as a moan, were unmistakable.

The attacker, clad in a prim, high-collared, calico dress, dropped the weaponized dictionary and covered her mouth in speechless shock.

Standing over a dazed Marcie Fleach, was a stunned Velma Dinkley.

"Marcie? _Marcie?_ "Velma whispered, not wanting a loud noise to jinx this long-hoped-for moment.

"Hey, V," came Marcie's muffled greeting from the floor.

A tear of elation slipped past Velma's demeanor, and she gave a grin so big that her face ached. Her friend from ages past, or ages yet to come, had, impossibly, found her.

She, quickly, fell to her knees and hugged Marcie, grateful and tight. "How did you get here?" she asked, in her friend's ear. "I mean...I'm guessing that you heard my message, but how did you get _here_? In this time period?"

"Long story, V, but it doesn't matter," Marcie said, squeezing her back with genuine, long-awaited affection. "You're safe! I thought I lost you, but I never stopped thinking about seeing you, again. By the way, what did you hit me with, a phonebook? Geez!"

"I'm sorry I whacked you," Velma apologized, helping Marcie up. "I thought you were Nitro, coming back. I wanted to jump him and get the key to my chains."

"No problem, V. I've got something for that."

Velma noticed Marcie's new attire, and stepped back to admire it. "Nice outfit, by the way. Is that...half a badge?"

"Yep," Marcie said, tipping her hat to, flirtatiously, play up the role of a chivalrous lawman. "I'm a duly appointed half-deputy to the town of Crystal Cove, ma'am."

"Well, I guess Crystal Cove's in much safer hands, then," Velma said to her, gently holding Marcie's, now trembling, hands.

"I...um, got to get you out of here," Marcie stammered. "The sheriff's downstairs and I've got to tell him that Nitro's here. He just destroyed Crystal Cove's bank."

"Okay, but we've got to watch out for Walinski, too."

"Who?"

"Some inventor who kidnapped me on my way to work, about a month ago. He took me to this lab/hideout, chained me up, and told me that he heard me talking, one day, to Shaggy and Scooby, in the market, about being from the future and wanted my knowledge and help.

"I knew what would do to history if I did, so I refused, but Walinski had a trump card." Velma said, pointing to a diagram on the wall.

On it, Marcie saw a drawn rectangle with a line coming from one side, stopping in the center, and then radiating as four lines, ending at an "x" on each corner of the rectangle.

"He said that an associate of his named Nitro, did him the favor of wiring up the school with dynamite, and said that if I didn't do what he told me, or try to escape, then he'd tell this Nitro to go to the school when the children are in class and blow it up."

"I'm a teacher, and I have a responsibility to my students, so I gave in, sketching and explaining any machine that I could remember for him, so he can take those designs and make retro versions of them to later patent and sell as his own, as well as help him with his revenge plot against the Darrows."

"How?"

"Whenever Walinski said that he was leaving to get the Darrows, he would always take me downstairs and chain me to the Geoscope, telling me to listen out for a bell that would ring outside, before he left. It was a signal for me to wait two hours and twenty-five minutes, after which, I was to turn the machine on for about twenty minutes, then turn it off. I don't know what he does in town, but, sometimes, Nitro would brag about wrecking another thing that belonged to the Darrows."

"Well, the timing sounds about right. It took us about two hours to get from Crystal Cove to here, on horseback, which means that the extra twenty-five minutes was probably time he needed to get to his next caper before you turned on the machine for its twenty minute run."

A thought occurred to Marcie, just then. If Sheriff Stone was here, he would have shook his head at the utter absurdity of it all. That the infamous 'Nitro' Walinski was not some vague, desperate criminal, but rather, some strange inventor.

Being the occasional guest in his holding cells, Marcie was regaled by the sheriff, time and again, by Wild West tales of his hero, Sheriff Iron Will, with the tales, eventually, becoming legend with the suicidal capture of Nitro in the mouth of an inexplicable volcano.

By working so close to the man and this strange case, it totally slipped her mind, and now, history and tragic truth would soon collide, with her being, most likely, an unexpected witness to those events.

"By the way, V. In our time, have you ever heard of any local legends about Nitro?" she asked.

"I can't say that I have. Why?"

"Because, thanks to Sheriff Stone's endless stories, I have," Marcie announced. "Spoiler alert! Walinski and 'Nitro' are the same guy."

"He is? Wow, I didn't know he was schizophrenic," Velma commented, matter-of-factly. "But, why is he attacking the Darrows? He invented the Geoscope. I've seen it. It was clearly ahead of its time. It's, basically, an ultrasound for finding mineral deposits."

"Yeah, I don't understand it, either. With something like that, why doesn't he just become a prospector, use the machine to find gold, and be rich?" mused Marcie.

A gasp from Velma brought Marcie out of her thoughts, and forced her to, worryingly, turn around to see what Velma saw behind her.

Nitro filled the doorway, a small gun in hand, and answered. "That's a very good question, my boy."

" _Girl_ ," Marcie frowned, wishing she had told the others where she was went.

"I was a great inventor." Nitro said, morosely. "My Geoscope would have made mining safer, more efficient, and more profitable. The Darrows said that they were interested in my machine, and invited me over to their mansion to learn more about it. I thought that all of my sacrifice would be rewarded.

"When I arrived, I was told by one of their servant not to come in. I told him that I was invited, and it wasn't until I practically fought with the man, that the Darrows, finally, came out to see me.

"They said that they wouldn't buy my device, because they decided that the science wasn't, forgive the pun, sound enough.

"I wanted to discuss my work. I wanted them to listen, but I could see in their eyes that it didn't matter to them. You see, my mother was Mexican and my father was Polish, something the Darrows weren't prepared for when they invited me, sight unseen.

"I had sunk every dime of my life savings into making the prototype, and its purchase would have solved all of my financial problems, for life. As it was, I was ruined. Until I realized, one day, that if I sent strong enough low-frequency sound waves directly into the Earth's crust, it would cause sympathetic vibrations through it, and travel out, say to the nearest town, by miles, Crystal Cove. Thus, my plan of revenge was born.

"I packed up everything I could, along with my invention, and secretly moved to this ghost town. Since the Darrows looked at me and saw a criminal, I would disguise myself as such. Using explosives, I would call myself 'Nitro,' and target every business the Darrow family owned, or had a stake in, living off of their stolen largesse, until I was ready to finish them off, for good.

"And that time is now! After I destroy the Darrows and the Crystal Cove their money and influence helped build, I intend to take their wealth that I stole from the bank, and all of those lovely inventions that your friend drew for me, and finance my own company."

"Wow," Marcie muttered. "I can't say that you're not ambitious."

"What can I say?" Nitro shrugged. "I'm the kind of man who wants it all. Now, how did you find this place?"

"It was me," Velma, boldly, interjected.

Nitro was genuinely surprised. "You? How?"

Velma faced him, defiantly. "I couldn't risk my students' lives by trying to escape, but that didn't mean I was helpless. So, whenever I ran the machine, I would turn it on and off, like a telegraph, carrying my message out, and hopefully, giving away your position."

"Apparently, you did," he admitted, before turning back to face Marcie, asking, "Did you come alone?"

Marcie hesitated. She couldn't let him know that Will and Red were just downstairs. Then, a flash of inspiration came to her, and she wasn't at all surprised that it was Velma who supplied it.

Finally, she answered, "Yes," before a bullet from Nitro's drawn two-shot Derringer slammed into her stomach, like a gut punch, and drove her to the floor.

"Guess I don't need you anymore, either, schoolmarm." Nitro said, pointing the gun at a mute, yet shaken, Velma, but before he could fire the last round into her, the rushed sound of boots stormed from downstairs.

With a curse, Nitro ran from the doorway and ducked into the room that he had entered earlier, forgetting to close the door behind him.

"Marcie? _Marcie?_ "Velma whispered by her side, barely able to breath. "Why? Why did you tell him that you were _alone_?" She wiped away a rolling tear from her cheek, smearing a streak of abdominal blood across it.

In the depths of losing Marcie, she didn't hear her say, "So he'd give away his position."

"What?" Velma yelped, wide-eyed and confused. She couldn't believe that Marcie was still breathing, let alone, talking to her.

"What can I say?" Marcie said. "You inspire me."

"Marcie! Are you alright?" Velma asked, urgency and elation shining through her reddened eyes.

"Yeah. Wow, that stung. Good thing my vest worked."

Velma looked down at the stomach wound. "Vest? But, you're bleeding!"

"That's not blood. It's just red dye mixed with the water and cornstarch. Had to give him a good show to fool him into thinking he got me, in case he thought about doing it, again."

Will and Red stormed into the room to see Marcie on the floor, her head resting in Velma's lap.

"Are you alright, deputy?" Will asked. "We heard a gunshot."

"Yeah, I'm okay," Marcie reported, as she got back on her feet. "The watery cornstarch in the bags really worked."

Red pointed to Velma's cheek, asking, "Hey, are you bleeding?"

She, absently, wiped at the red streak. "Huh? Oh, that's not my blood, it's Marcie's. I mean it's not _her_ blood, it's fake."

Will looked genuinely flabbergasted, another rare thing for him. "You mean to tell me those little magic bags of cornstarch actually stopped a bullet?"

Marcie held up a finger for emphasis. " _Wet_ cornstarch. Very important, and it's hardly magic, Sheriff. Remind me to explain non-Euclidean forces to you, sometime."

"Never mind that! Where's Nitro?" Will asked.

"He ran down the hall and into one of the bedrooms," Velma told him, pointing out the doorway. "But, Sheriff, we think that he's really Walinski!"

"Who?" Will and Red asked in unison.

"The earthquake/kidnapping guy," Marcie said. "Let's get him!"

"No!" Will commanded, sharply. "He's armed, and way too dangerous for any of you to tangle!"

Then, he soften his words. This was something that he needed to say. "But, I want you all to know that you helped me out more than I deserved on this case. You helped save my reputation, and honored the good name of Justice and I. As your last official act as _full_ deputies...get your friend to safety."

Will said no more. He solemnly tipped his hat to all of them, and then bolted down the hall, and into the room with the open door.

The two deputies, momentarily, stood basking in Iron Will's praise, but Marcie's mood was bittersweet. There was something disturbingly final about Will's words, but too much time was ticking away, she couldn't compromise history by warning him of his looming death, and they had yet to complete the sheriff's ultimate order.

An order, Marcie was only too happy to comply with.

"Come on," she told them.


	5. 5

_5~_

Downstairs, the trio jogged across the hotel's lobby, but before their reached the front doors, the whole town bucked from an unexpected tremor.

Their collective attention, then turned briefly to the towering machine in the center of the lobby.

"How is he doing that?" Red asked, nervously. "Nitro's gone and the machine's here, with us."

"Did you leave it on?" Marcie asked Velma.

"No, but it _had_ been used a lot. No telling what kind of local, ecological damage it did, in the interim."

Another detonation was felt under them, shaking the ceiling fixtures off of the already decrepit building. The nervous neighing of the horses prompted them to leave the hotel in a hurry to see to them, as they were their only transportation back to civilization.

The teens ran into the street, sighed in relief that the horses hadn't ran off, and stopped to see two surprising sights, overhead.

The first was seeing Sheriff Williamson climbing, laboriously, up one of the ascending blimp's mooring ropes that dangled from the side railing of the gondola's observation deck.

The second, and, considerably, more concerning, were the gouts of pressurized, sulfurous steam, gas and super-hot ejecta that was puffing and spitting from the cauldron of Mount Diabla, her peak, just collapsed and revealing the inferno that roiled within her, while the nascent volcano shook off tons of loose stone and rock in sporadic avalanches, and gave a basso profundo birth cry.

Being so close to the epicenter of building eruption, another tremor rocked the trio to the ground.

Knowing what she knew, Marcie, soberly, said nothing, while Red and Velma yelled to Will to jump to a nearby roof and escape with them, but he was either too high, the eruption, too noisy, or he was just too stubborn to hear them, as the airship climbed parallel to the slopes of Diabla.

In the control cabin, Walinski's mind see-sawed between two thoughts. He wanted to make them all suffer, the Darrows, Iron Will and his meddlesome deputies, and the troublesome Velma, for interfering in his important work, and he also entertained daydreams of wealth enough to last the rest of his days, thanks to the satchel of sketches and crude diagrams Velma drew for him, that rested in his cramped quarters in the gondola.

The erupting of Diabla was an unanticipated, yet fortuitous boon for him, as he pitched the airship towards the peak.

"I'll use this new volcano's eruption to discourage pursuit," he goaded himself. "Then, I'll be free."

"Don't count on it."

Walinski whirled around to find Will filling the doorway, his fists balled tight.

"You!" Walinski hissed.

"Surprised that I'm still breathing, Nitro?"

"I suppose my fuses burned too long in the bank, and bought you time to escape, but I still hurt the Darrows, in any case," Nitro considered.

"What are you jawing about?"

"I did my research. A Darrow was one of the bank's shareholders, and, in fact, he had controlling shares in it, so, in essence, he owns the bank. Since I was in town, I thought I'd stop over and make a deposit and a withdrawal," Nitro boasted. "In that, I would deposit dynamite and withdraw their money, and the bank, from the Darrows. But, what is it you want, lawman? Aren't you, already, out of your jurisdiction?"

"I suppose I am," Will admitted. "But then, nobody's living in Scorpion Wells to complain about it. Now, turn this thing around and give up, peaceably. I'm only going to tell you once."

"That's agreeable! I only have to _kill_ you once!" Walinski sneered.

He fired his Derringer, hidden in the nook of his closed palm, the last shot punching into Will, but not stopping him from rushing the surprised scientist, like an enraged steer, into the flight control console.

As the airship suddenly lurched forward and down, a disarming twist of his gun hand, and a solid gut punch doubled the winded Walinski over into Will, as the sheriff, deftly, handcuffed the scientist to himself.

"If you used a man's gun," Will said. "You could've brought me down." He, suddenly, found himself flushed, and quickly had to rest against the edge of the console, for a moment, a cloud of regret and a feeling of being cold, despite being over an active volcano, settling over him.

He looked down to see a tiny red spot, in the center of his torso, turn into a crimson poppy field with distressing speed, as arterial blood pumped freely from the open wound and, warmly, soaked his shirt. Bleeding out and miles from any civilized medicine, he knew, grimly, that these were his final moments.

"Dang!" he muttered, contritely. "I guess I should've used that girl's rig, after all."

Will tried to quiet his thoughts, remarking to himself that today, he knew how the mountain felt. Both hard, proud, and tall, now, both wounded and gushing because of a little man.

Outside, the blimp began to drift so, dangerously, close to the mouth of Diabla, that ejecta that was spewed into high, parabolic arcs, started landing on the fragile craft, burning holes through the wooden gondola and its deck.

Will's consciousness wavered, as did his balance and over-all strength, while he tried to maintain his stature. Only the console held him upright, and he could barely feel a crazed Walinski tugging at his restraint, threatening to pull the man's hand off, or hear him screaming.

"Look what you did! We're too low and the blimp's on fire! You've killed us!"

"No, I...stopped...a fugitive," Will managed to say, fighting to stay awake and keep from blacking out.

Thick smoke and the cloying scent of burning, varnished wood began to seep and cloud into the cabin from the inferno that was being fed, outside. They both could hear the crackle and roar of the flames, and the snapping of hemp lines that connected the gondola to the gas-bag, above.

Feeling waves of motion sickness, due to a rapid descent, Walinski craned his neck to look out of the forward window, and was lost in despair, as he saw down the approaching throat of well-named Diabla, and saw a glowing snapshot of Hell.

"We're...We're doomed," he whispered, on the verge of tears.

Will overheard him, a sleep coming over his weakened body. It wouldn't be long, he knew, and yet it answered him with a comfort, a truth that once motivated him in life, and now, would give him a sense of peace in death. "I am...Justice. While...I'm alive...I am Justice."

Walinski turned to regard Will and mercifully look away from his fiery death, hissing, bitterly, "Platitudes! You're going to _die_ because of those empty platitudes!"

The sheriff couldn't fight the balm of sleep any longer, and countered with a tired growl, "Then, I'll be...Dead Justice..."

Marcie, Velma and Red stood rooted in the shadow of the volcano, in stunned, silent horror, as the gondola's burning ropes led their flames up onto the hydrogen-filled gas-bag.

With the merest breach of its skin, the gas-bag swelled into a roaring puff of flaming expansion, exploding the bag into fiery flaps of canvas and freed ropes, releasing the heavier gondola, with a lawman and his quarry, inside, into the unrelenting heat and flames of the magma lake, before it, too, fluttered through the thermals and settled over the incinerating ruins, as a temporary and consumed shroud.

The surrounding land continued to dance under the teens' boots, as more ejecta began to rain around them, raising the temperature, even at ground level, and prompting them to, finally, favor self-preservation over sudden dismay and grief, and beat a hasty retreat.

As they mounted their rides and guided them, hastily, out of the ghost town, Diabla continued to seed the weathered, nearby buildings with hot rock, which fell on and ignited the dry roofs of the town.

The teens rode out in the general direction of Crystal Cove, with the shocks of Diabla's eruption gradually beginning to subside, because of distance, as their collective hearts remained saddened over the shocking deaths of Sheriff William Williamson and the troubled Nitro Walinski.

They gave sad, silent prayers in the desert, hoping that their mutual passing was swift, as, behind them, Scorpion Wells, itself, crumbled and passed away into memory, under the fiery light of its own funeral pyre.

* * *

The following two weeks were eventful, not simply because _The Crystal Crier_ and every other local newspaper reported accurate and more embellished stories concerning the eruption of a volcano so close to civilization.

But, with a joyous reunion of Velma and her close friends, all had begun to get their affairs in order for the long-awaited trip back to their own era.

First, was the severing of their jobs, as they awkwardly made excuses or outright lied to explain their need to quit at the last minute, feeling a little guilty about leaving their employers high and dry without time to find replacements.

Next, the deputies made it their business to confront the Darrow family and City Hall with the news of the death of the town's sheriff in the course of his duties, making sure that the family and the town acknowledged his heroism.

Then, the rescued packed what little they would take with them, mostly personal effects, like wedding items, a prized recipe for chuck wagon stew, and a class picture of Velma and her students, and lastly, before the end, they all gathered in Crystal Cove Cemetery, around the empty grave of William 'Iron Will' Williamson, to pay their solemn respects.

Marcie, absently, held her flowers, while she stared at his headstone, in thought. Regretfully, a little voice wanted her to warn him about the volcano, about his death, but she knew, sadly, that she did the right thing in letting history play out. They were, already, playing too fast and loose with time, as it was, and needed to do what was necessary to maintain its integrity.

But, in the brief time that she knew him, it wasn't a waste to her. Will's unique life and legacy lived on in her, and the others, with its rough charm.

Yes, his dogged work ethic was inspiring to behold, but it wasn't all that he was. His sense of fair play, his wisdom, and, yes, even his own gruff, folksy, dry-as-toast brand of humor touched Marcie in a way that surprised her almost as much as her tears did.

She once said, in defiance, that she was a detective. Not because she wanted to sharpen her mind, or distract herself from her troubles, but for the same reason she risked her life to journey into the past, because her heart wanted to help someone who couldn't stand on her own. Will saw that in her, even if he didn't know that she was centuries from home.

Everything he said and did, Marcie discovered, was about who he was, what kind of life he led, and how, in the end, he deigned to pass on what he learned onto her. Because of that, she couldn't see herself, now, as merely, his deputy of convenience, but as his student.

As she, finally, placed her flowers and her sincere gratitude by his tombstone, she, quietly, gave him her thanks, and was eager to take his teachings back with her, to serve her in her own time.

Eventually, the erstwhile deputies, slowly, led their five charges up the high, lonely hill where two tombs sat.

They all took turns walking through the illusion of the faux crypt, and soon, with a shimmering glow of leaked vortex energy, briefly, illuminating the concealing shroud, the Mark II, gradually, faded from view, as the distant ash clouds of a slumbering Mount Diabla painted the cloudy skies of the dying day in ethereal red and gold.


End file.
